I think it's a useful anecdote because it underscores how catastrophically unreliable* agents can be, especially in the hands of users who aren't experienced in the particular domain. In the domain of programming, it's much easier to quantify a "catastrophic" scenario vs. more open-ended "real world" situations like booking a flight.

* "unreliable" may not be the right word. For all we know, the agent performed admirably given whatever the user's prompt may have been. Just goes to show that even in a relatively constricted domain of programming, where a lot (but far from all) outcomes are binary, the room for misinterpretation and error is still quite vast.