> It blows my mind that a kernel driver with the level of proliferation in industry could make it out the door apparently without even the most basic level of qualification.

Discussed elsewhere it is claimed that the file causing the crash was a data file that has been corrupted in the delivery process. So the development team and their CI have probably tested a good version, but the customer received a bad one.

If that is true to problem is that the driver first uses an unsigned file at all, so all customer machines are continuously at risk for local attacks. And then it does not do any integrity check on the data it contains, which is a big no no for all untrusted data, whether user space or kernel.