>this describes but one example of an edge case that could be elegantly handled by informing the node that it must go down and come up again a while later, after which its swapped-out guts with the potential to cause issue might be more easily resolved.

Huh? They manually and explicitly stopped their own instance and then started it up again. Given that you don't pay for stopped instances it's sort of obvious that they don't really exist but are recreated upon being started again. What does amazon have to do with this?

To me, it's not an edge case so much as missing the meaning of "stopping" and "starting" an instance on ec2.