Even though this article is just intended to be a cute quip about the origins of something we all take for granted, if I were a person who was negatively affected due to the author skipping 'corporate bureaucracy at Microsoft'( perhaps a victim of this kind of bug[1] ), i'd probably find the authors "how risky was this feature?" statement to be pretty irritating.
Is there any way to know that such a bug would have been included had they followed procedure? Of course not. But, we do know that those procedures and processes exist for that very reason : to ship a higher quality product
[1]: https://technet.microsoft.com/library/security/ms99-018
Not always. It is possible for procedures and processes to exist simply because someone somewhere is trying to justify receiving a paycheck. This is especially true for large bureaucracies.
And sometimes, procedures and processes exist because the organization simply does not realize that they are outdated and unnecessary. "This is how we have always done it" is a common saying in large organizations that have been around for a long time.
Bottom line: don't put much faith in procedures and processes. Question everything.
And no, it's not really a crisis-level issue. The modern web is full of hundreds of little annoyances, it's pretty much the nature of the game. But I felt it was on-topic all the same.
But yeah, complaining about it here certainly isn't going to change anything; and I'll agree that the story behind it was interesting to hear even if I despise the result of it.
"But now I look back & realize that we did the right thing. Seriously, how risky was this feature?"
By "the right thing" he's referring to checking in a relatively minor and risk-free feature late at night without going through the corporate bureaucracy at Microsoft.
Besides, I think you're making a big deal out of it. It's supposed to be an entertaining story about how favicon.ico came into existence, not a deep analysis of whether it was the correct way to implement it.