The author asks for a deep, system-theoretic analysis... immediately after the incident. That's just not how reality works.
When the house is on fire, you put it out and write a quick "the wiring was bad" report so everyone calms down. You don't write a PhD thesis on electrical engineering standards within 24 hours. The deep feedback-loop analysis happens weeks later, usually internally.
Thinking the consideration of feedback loops requires "deep" analysis is, I suspect, part of the problem! The insufficient feedback shows up at a very shallow level.
Reading cloudflare's description of the problem, this is something that I could easily see my own company missing. It's the case that a file got too big which tanked performance enough to bring everything down. That's a VERY hard thing to test for. Especially since this appears to have been a configuration file and a regular update.
The reason it's so hard to test for is because all tests would show that there's no problem. This isn't a code update, it was a config update. Without really extensive performance tests (which, when done well, take a long time!) there really wasn't a way to know that a change that appeared safe wasn't.
I personally give Cloudflare a huge pass for this. I don't think this happened due to any sloppiness on their part.
Now, if you want to see a sloppy outage you look at the Crowdstrike outage from a few years back that bricked basically everything. That is what sheer incompetence looks like.
Oh okay, well I guess the outage wasn't a real issue then
If the analysis has not uncovered the feedback problems (even with large effort, or without it), my argument is that a better method is needed.