This is very unusual.
For anyone interested the best sources of knowledgeable commentary is ppprune and avherald. Every other site is armchair speculation.
If you believed your airplane was at imminent risk of a stall, it would be deeply negligent to spend mental cycles talking to ATC instead of fixing it. ATC exists to sequence traffic; they can't fly your plane for you.
The previous flight which suffered the same problems called in a PanPan before resolving the faulty sensor issue.
Reports are also saying that this fault was noted on the last 4 flights.
Probably because he was too busy trying to keep the plane flying. Also, apparently Boieng hadn't notified the airlines and their pilots about this most recent "feature" that could see the airplane "pushing it down unexpectedly and so strongly that flight crews can’t pull it back up", which certainly must have added to the pilots' confusion in this case.
> That warning came as a surprise to many pilots who fly the latest models for U.S carriers. Safety experts involved in and tracking the investigation said that at U.S. carriers, neither airline managers nor pilots had been told such a system had been added to the latest 737 variant—and therefore aviators typically weren’t prepared to cope with the possible risks.
If you can't Aviate you don't do the other 2
As with any story, don't slavishly follow one source. In fact with aircraft accidents my general advice is to ignore all 'coverage' for a year.
As with any story, don't slavishly follow one source.