Well, that's clearly ridiculous, but it's good to hear that it was reopened and the system worked.

"the system worked"

A system that requires moderation / higher authority to work normally isn't really working, it just has an error recovery mechanism. Systems built on the negative being right and the positive needing proof are particularly painful.

It didn't work very well if all of those hoops had to be jumped through just to have the question recognized as valid.

Bugs happen. If they get fixed, the process works. It's unrealistic to think that, in an open system, no-one will ever do the wrong thing.

If there are enough people complaining that the error recovery system is invoked far too often, the "one-off" bug should instead be given higher priority as a design flaw.

The problem is, it's easy to pull out specific examples that illustrate bad attitudes, mistakes, etc. Stack Overflow gets somewhere between 8 and 9 thousand questions every day - even with only a small % of those being closed, downvoted, dumped on, etc. that's still a lot of opportunity for error - in both directions (plenty of embarrassingly-bad and outright abusive/trolling posts stick around too long too).

So, there are checks and balances and venues for appeal and we try and provide opportunities for both automated systems and humans to review and appeal any decision. If you're patient, it works. If you're not... Well, it's probably not a good place for you to be.

This wasn't a bugfix, it was a workaround.