Yes, this a rotten situation, and I sympathize with the motivation. No, I don't think we should blithely disregard the fact that the worm is likely causing genuine harm and that it was in fact created to cause harm.
Right now we have script-kiddy teenagers; Real Soon Now there won't be much reason to expect your average 5-year-old with a Youtube account, won't be able to slap together something like a ransomware worm from readily-available components, that will spread itself a billionfold. And, amongst 7 billion people and growing, there's going to be a lot of kids thinking that that sounds like a fun time.
The only thing to really stop this from being the world we live in, is making worms irrelevant.
(And what we do in the short term, about this case? Honestly, I haven't bothered to think about it. Too "identity politics.")
Right now, we're beginning to treat DDoSes in that "infectious agent"/"your responsibility if you don't act to protect yourself" way. So many people do them, so often and so easily, that "shutting down the botters" one-by-one will never make DDoSes go away. So we have to just figure out how to deal with them. (Which will, coincidentally, make DDoSes actually go away, if everyone ends up immune to them such that it's no longer useful to do one.)
But, annoyingly, we still handle bots programmed to scan for and exploit software vulnerabilities (worms, ransomware, what-have-you) as only intentional malicious action on the part of their original author, to be solved by catching the author. (Not that you can't catch the author—but that won't stop a worm, and especially won't stop someone else from just slightly-modifying and then re-releasing the worm.) We haven't bothered nearly at all with the "how do we make software vulnerabilities, as a class, less exploitable" part of the equation.
Personally, I'm hoping that this decade sees "A-Life" computer worms, that self-modify using (machine-readable?) 0days they discover by spidering the web from their infected hosts. Computers would be being attacked with novel exploits, even with no new malware authors to do the attacking! Then we'd really have to treat vulnerabilities as a fact of life to secure around, rather than something we can stop by just stopping people from bothering to exploit them.