My understanding is that stapling is the victim of the usual incompetence and laziness that infects a lot of systems where if one in a billion fail closed that would be considered a disaster but one in ten fail open is considered fine. You can't achieve meaningful security this way.

The browser vendors have learned that you have to do it yourself or it won't be done well enough to be useful. So you pull every CRL, do a bunch of compression or other tricks, then give your users that data and now they have working revocation.

When Bob's CA and Kebab Shop breaks their revocation stack, instead of dozens of poor individual users or web site owners confused and calling Bob's outsourced call centre in Pakistan with no sign of a fix, now a Google account exec asks Bob's CTO whether they forgot to say they were getting out of the CA business...

I agree this isn't a desirable outcome, but it might be all we have.