If you meant the smtp plugin 3.11.0, then definitely not. I analyzed the changes from the previous version line by line and the changes only implement what is claimed (primarily the gmail one-click as email provider).
If you mean this user "VIP", well that might be the case... because there is really no way that this error should happen. The smtp plugin author changed dozens of occurences of manage_options to instead be this call which is a one-line function that just returns the exact same thing it replaced "manage_options".. as it is, the change is useless, but presumably the author is preparing for deprecation or some other future changes. In any case, I have this exact code deployed on a dozen sites and it works perfectly.
However, that said, I did want to remind people that although the smtp plugin authors don't seem to care or cause problems, they do technically get your information if you use the one-click type email setups because that uses their site to do it... (
https://api.wpmailsmtp.com/gmail/v1/ is a fresh example added to this latest version to make gmail work). You could null this to send bogus information (it harvests your IP address with a new get_ip function) but really since they could easily have server-side checking of the license (which is also sent in the gmail one-click setup) then it's better, if you care about that, to just not use the new gmail functionality.
As for the VIP error above.. my suggestion was going to be to uninstall the plugin completely and reinstall it, or just switch to the totally free FluentSMTP
https://wordpress.org/plugins/fluent-smtp/ (I tested this on several of my sites and it works great). But infection? Well, I don't know what mechanism might cause that.. but it's always possible and with all the security problems of wordpress sites generally it's worth looking into.