In this case, however, it was handled horribly. During the embargo period, we kept telling Intel and AMD what they were doing wrong, and they wouldn't listen (or alternatively, they made clear enough that they wouldn't listen that we didn't even try). But really there's little more than I can do than hope that the next time they listen to us.
... for Linux distributions the actual embargo time was a little less than two months. That is actually a very small time to do the amount of work that was needed to mitigate Meltdown and Spectre. No Linux distribution was able to ship retpolines on the date the embargo was lifted (heck, only RHEL and SuSE shipped anything for Spectre at all), and the extra week would have bought us nothing. We would have needed to be notified a month or two earlier.