Wow, that video was tough to get through (excellent link!). As soon as her HR started dropping with low sats she was circling the drain on what should have been a routine, relatively straightforward surgery.
It's interesting to me that, also coming from an EMS background, my (armchair) reaction to that situation is to escalate the intervention much, much more rapidly (I would have tubed the patient as soon as her HR started dropping, and tried an OPA much sooner). I suspect that this has a lot to do with my internal mental framing of airway management: in the field, airway problems can quite quickly lead to death -- the framing emphasizes risk -- but in a hospital setting, especially a surgical one, mild-to-moderate airway problems are frequently encountered, and the framing emphasizes minimizing negative impact to the patient.
There is a well produced reenactment of an anesthesia team falling victim to the "vortex" (resulting in fatal injury to their patient): https://vimeo.com/103516601
In fire and EMS we generally refer to the concept of an "accident chain". In any event where rescue personnel are injured or killed, there is a chain of events that had to take place leading up to that accident. Breaking the chain at any point would prevent the accident from occurring, and many of our procedures are built around the idea of breaking accident chains as early as possible. This is a concept that (as far as I know) originated in the aviation industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_of_events_(aeronautics)
It's the same basic idea though... The further along the chain you allow the event to progress (even if you don't know the end result), the less margin for error you have.