I don't believe that the same specific bug has manifested itself across many many different HFT algorithms run by many different actors over a long period of time, in a way that loses money consistently for everyone involved whenever the bug is triggered, without ever being addressed by anyone.
To argue otherwise is contrary to my current understanding of software engineering best practices - imagine another industry where every service provider has the same bug manifest in the same way, across all their different software stacks - some running Java, some Python, some even with their own proprietary languages - and no one ever catches it even though it's losing money and it's occurence is easily identifiable on a time-series graph (so very easy to be matched up with all available logging data)? No one has the resources to throw a team of devs at this for 6 months to identify the bug, or they do and they're just willing to lose money and not make every last nickel they can? Not a single person is trying to reach for that lost money with a bug fix or a novel tweak to their own existing algo? For years?
I believe it's more likely that either the actors who are quote stuffing believe they are benefiting by tipping their hand early with false information, or they actually are benefiting.
It's hard to imagine how these actors could be benefiting; perhaps they believe that someone is watching their quotes in transit or has visibility into their quotes before trades are executed, and the quote-stuffers are trying to fake these malicious actors out?
The alternative scenario where quote-stuffers are not benefiting from their actions - or rather, that they aren't even operating under the irrational assumption that they are benefiting (because the quote stuffers could be stuffing intentionally but incorrectly) - seems much more implausible.
It seems to involve a whole lot more things going wrong in a very specific very atypical way,from a software development standpoint, with no one every interested in picking up the money they're dropping on the floor due to this bug when things go wrong, over the course of years, even though all the data to pinpoint the source of the bug is public, charted, and discussed openly.
The first scenario just requires a quote stuffer to hold a possibly incorrect belief about the other actors in the market. The second requires multiple specific distinct software development failures to line up like dominoes and stay lined up without anyone ever addressing their root causes.
But who knows :) <shrug> Trading is chaos, after all.