Author of the blog post here.

Yeah, this is generally a good practice. The silver lining is that our suffering helped uncover the underlying issue faster. :)

This isn’t part of the blog post, but we also considered getting the servers and keeping them idle, without actual customer workload, for about a month in the future. This would be more expensive, but it could help identify potential issues without impacting our users. In our case, the crashes started three weeks after we deployed our first AX162 server, so we need at least a month (or maybe even longer) as a buffer period.