The pure takeaway is probably that it's important to design systems where "large" operations are rarely required, and frequent ops actions are all "small."
Because otherwise, you're asking for an impossible process (quick and protected).
Some tools are well engineered, capable of the Sisyphean task of globally deploying updates but others are rapid prototypes that, sure, are too dangerous to exist, but the whole point of SREs being capable programmers is that the work has problems that are most efficiently solved with one-off code that just isn't (because it can't be) rigorously tested before being used. You can bet there was some of that used in recovering from this incident. (I'm sure there were many eyes reviewing the code before being run, but that only goes so far when you're trying to do something that you never expected, like having to revive Facebook.)
There's solutions to that, but of course these sorts of tools all come into existence well before the system reaches a size where how they work becomes dangerous.
If your tool is capable of draining the whole universe, period, it is too dangerous to exist.
That was one of the big takeaways: global config changes must happen slowly. (Whether we've fully internalized that lesson is a different matter.)