That is completely the wrong lesson from this anecdote.
1) The acquiring company didn't do proper due diligence. Sorry, this is diligence 101--where are the accounts and who has the keys?
2) Click-Ops is FINE. In a startup, you do what you need now and the future can go to hell because the company may be bankrupt tomorrow. You fix your infra when you need to in a startup.
3) Long-time employee seemed to have exactly the right amount of paranoia regarding his bosses. The fact that the buyout appears to have killed his job and paid so little that he was willing to torch his reputation and risk legal action for merely five figures says something.
+1 for "click-ops", perfectly put.
Pretty much. The lesson learned for me was to always have version control for the complete stack including the infra for the stack. I like terraform for this. Terragrunt at least solves the issue of modules for terraform reducing the verbosity. Assume things could go wrong and you will need to redeploy EVERYTHING. I've been there.
Sounds like the tiniest acquisition mistake I’ve ever heard of.
Spin up new instances, load data from snapshots, get back to work.
Because it is hard to manage the configuration. It's why tools like terraform exist.
Anecdote. I worked for a small company that was later acquired. It turned out one of the long time employees had set up the company's AWS account using his own Amazon account. Bad on it's own. We built out the infra in AWS. A lot of it was "click-ops". There was no configuration management. Not even CloudFormation (which is not all that great in my opinion). Acquiring company realizes mistake after the fact. Asks employee to turn over account. Employee declines. Acquiring company bites the bullet and shells out a five figure sum to employee to "buy" his account. Could have been avoided with some form of config management.