Just reading all of these made me question if it actually was this secure. It seemed very much like a moral panic. Sure I patched as soon as it came out, but taking websites offline seemed a bit much.
To be fair, the warning to either take down websites or patch immediately on release came from the people who've been working on this for months (or those with advance notices like CERTs), not out of nowhere. People just took it down pre-emptively since exploit attempts (whether working or not) popped up in logs way before the patch was released, but it also took forever until the fix actually landed downstream after the advisories were released.