I think this is a big slap to company when they need to talk to their enterprise customers. I am not sure how we can really prevent this from happening by implementing an industry standard.
The ENTIRE Saturn 5 rocket had to be wheeled back to the hangar and the CM dismantled and rebuilt, resulting in a month long delay in the launch.
When the Apollo launchpad manager was asked if he had fired the technician in question, then answer was allegedly "Nope. He is the one guy on the next launch team that I know will NEVER make the same mistake again."
I am willing to bet that Gitlab is now a company that will never slacken off their backup checking in the future.
This same general story appears in different forms with million dollar trading errors, etc. But I have to wonder if it's really that good of a lesson. If you truly take it to heart, you could potentially keep people on the team that are legitimately incompetent which could result in another catastrophic failure.
If a surgeon keeps killing patients because he keeps forgetting to wash his hands, then he needs to be fired.
If a developer skips all company policies and deploys directly to production without a good reason, then he needs to be fired.
There are reasonable mistakes, then there are errors resulting from wreckless actions indicative of a larger problem with the person's view towards their work.
Make the same mistake again, you get fired.
All commercial aircraft have checklists in place, and a two person cross checking system in the cockpit, as well as mechanical means to detect potential problems - but aircraft still every now and then land with their gear still up etc.
Does it make economic sense for an organisation that has invested possibly millions of dollars in training a pilot to immediately sack him/her for a costly mistake like this? Sure, disciplinary action and possible demotion within the ranks is a given, but will you get rid of the one person who will be almost fanatical about never landing with the gear up again?
If they consistently make technical mistake and are sloppy in their airmanship, then sure, fire away. But it is going to be pretty much impossible to design a 'system' that can prevent human errors from creeping in.