You're right that quantization isn't anything special here, but red herring isn't the right word, it's just "embarrassingly simple", per the title.
This reminds of this very interesting paper [1] that finds that it's fairly "easy" to uncensor a model (modify it's refusal thingy)
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1cerqd8/refusal...