I guess the grid controller requesting a pause of the power reduction to compensate for another plant going offline didn't happen either, and the test wasn't pushed back from the day shift to the completely unprepared night shift - and I guess they didn't manage to botch the entire procedure by placing the reactor in an extremely unstable state from which recovery was impossible due to a known design quirk kept secret from its operators?
I'll say it wasn't. You're right about the issues; however, the root cause comes from a culture that views any form of problem as a personal fault. These guys were just the end result of a long list of fails. When you treat any form of failure as personal, there is perverse incentive to ignore or hide faults until all of it lines up, ie the Swiss-cheese model. The people running Chernobyl shouldn't have been in that position in the first place: untrained, ill-informed, and under-the-gun to perform.
Look up the section for Anatoly Dyatlov
I'm not an expert but to me it looks like they are still in some kind of testing/verification/certification phase? According to its operator's website[0] they ran into some minor technical issues during ramp-up, which of course have to be fixed as well.
The alternative is going into full production before testing has been finished, but that's how we got Chernobyl. I'd rather have it operate at an energy loss for a few months so they can carefully work out all the teething problems than have it irradiate a decent bunch of France and England.
[0]: https://www.edf.fr/la-centrale-nucleaire-de-flamanville-3-ep...