That, however, contradicts their other assertion that past researchers have fuzzed the fonts and found many vulnerabilities. They can't both be easily true, so there must be something further going on.
"it was trivial to discover with a dumb fuzzer, and it's surprising that such a bug could even survive until 2015, with so much work being supposedly put into the security of font processing."
(Emphasis mine.) I suppose they might be underplaying the complexity of the steps required to reproduce their finds, but it really doesn't look like it. Honestly I'm not that surprised. At times like this I'm reminded of the sheer amount of security holes out there in the wild and I just want to chuck my computer in the lake.
The backup tapes? I'm sure the trash is fine.