I see what you are saying. But he is also sort of the director to this whole thing. The research question itself is worthwhile and I don't think if it was done properly this much time would be wasted. All they have to prove is that it will pass few code reviews. That's a few man hours and I really don't think people will be mad about that. This whole fiasco is about the scale of man hours wasted both because they repeatedly made these "attacks" and because this thing slipped into stable code. Both would be avoided in this scheme.

But I would like to put in a disclaimer that before getting to that point they could have done so many other things. Review the publicly available review processes, see how security bugs get introduced by accident and see if that can be easily done by a bad actor, etc.