Perhaps the silver lining here, if there is one, from the outage situation is to demonstrate a very real world and publicly visible case as to how these hold functions work.
The public can suffer in situations of its misuse.... vis-a-vis 'friendly fire' consequences of inelegance in takedowns when directed.
This is exactly why registries and registrars push back on ensuring we apply some due process like asking for evidentiary support when receiving abuse reports or push back a little before we use serverHold or clientHold on a domain name and ask for evidence. Those statuses remove the authoritative nameservers from the TLD zone and cause resolution to fast fail.