> retired folks needed money to live on and were forced to remove some of their nest egg at the bottom

While I understand that people who are already retired can't just choose to keep working while their investments recover, I'm not aware of any retirement investing strategy that has you fully invested in stocks at the point you retire. The whole point of moving your retirement to safer investments around retirement age is so you don't have to take money out of stocks when there is a financial downturn.

I may be missing something, but you seem to be describing retirees with a very risky asset allocation. I'm not trying to minimize how devastating that was for people, but I am trying to understand what they were victims of. Were they victims of financial advisors recommending that type of asset allocation?