That it took 37 hours to fix is the most bizarre part of this to me. Shouldn't people have been throwing circuit breakers and bringing the whole thing back up from a cold start long before then? What's the feasibility of someone eventually using a 0-day to compromise a node and carrying out a similarly crippling attack, but on purpose?
"Power cycle all 10,000 (or however many there are) network nodes simultaneously" is so far out of the realm of feasibility as to be humorous. There is a lot of infrastructure designed to keep those things powered up at almost any cost and approximately zero infrastructure designed to intentionally bring a network of that size down in one swoop.
Still, "packet that lasts forever and tells nodes to send to all" sounds more like how the hero of a 70s movie kills an evil robot than something that'd cause a 37-hour infrastructure failure in 2019.