While these things are important, to me the critical phrase in the article is this: ...It seems highly improbably that, as one of the most qualified people to diagnose this bug, I was the first to notice it...
My system hangs when typing text all of the time. Reading this article, this indicates to me that 1) It probably hangs for tens of millions of other people, and 2) Nobody either has the time or money to do anything about it.
That sucks. Additionally, it appears to be a situation that's only gotten worse over time (for whatever reason).
You can look for potential answers as you point out. More importantly, however, is the fact that nobody is aware of the scope of these problems. Millions of hours lost, the situation getting worse, and there's nobody hearing the users scream and nobody (directly) responsible for fixing things. In my mind, figure those things out and then we can start talking about specific patterns of behavior that might limit such problems in the future.
tl;dr Who's responsible for fixing this and how would they ever know it needs fixing? Gotta have that in place before anything else.