To be clear, that's a link that agrees with me that it can be impossible, not a link that says they just needed to work harder.

It's also from a 20 year-old manual, and isn't present on newer manuals, and pilots haven't trained on it in decades. Not appropriate to expect pilots to know, and possibly not helpful here: the pilots were low altitude, so allowing the nose to drop even further (to relieve aerodynamic load) may have been deadly too.