A lot of people seem to conflate speaking professionally with speaking like a doormat. Verizon, specifically the team in charge of this system, fucked up. There are varying levels to that of course; if you mess up the fonts in the end of month report to your super and he calls you a fucking idiot, he's probably an unbalanced person in need of mental help. If on the other hand you knock dead 15% of GLOBAL Internet traffic out of sheer laziness, I'd say you've earned more than a few 'go fuck yourself's.
I don't think it was clearly laziness. It could have been a configuration mistake.
Clearly Verizon has inbound prefix filtering in place otherwise this would be a common occurrence for AS 701 and it is most certainly not. And it's quite surprising and sad to see how willing people are to just blindly parrot Cloudflare here and pile on. This of course was the desired outcome of the blog post.