I believe the captain was primed - IIRC, did he not, in his position as a senior captain, write a memo to other pilots of the airline about the issue?
Again IIRC, and reading between the lines, I think the Boeing/FAA response to LNI610 was to remind pilots of the existing trim runaway procedure, in keeping with the story that no significant change had been made to the aircraft handling. They were still being cagey about the existence of MCAS, let alone its power and its dependence on a single sensor on any given flight, and the people writing the airworthiness directive were apparently unaware that the power of MCAS had been increased after initial flight testing. Did the directive even mention that, unlike the behavior in previous versions, using the yoke switches to countermand a system-driven trim change did not stop it, if that system was MCAS? It would seem to have worked, but then MCAS would do it again.
I believe the crew had trouble manually re-trimming on account of the load on the stabilizer jackscrew, which in turn was due to how far MCAS had driven it out of trim. I think someone (Blancolirio on Youtube?) said that training rarely, if ever, got that deep into the issue.
At least two things have changed since then: the power of MCAS has been reduced, and pilots have been fully primed about it.
The issue of the second pilot's inexperience in some countries is an issue that goes beyond the Max, as it means that the captain effectively has to deal with emergencies single-handedly, at least if they go 'out-of-book' like this.