Not to minimize this but people that "rely on these machines for their livelihoods more than ever" generally don't update a major OS update the second it's released. Or, they sure shouldn't – would you not agree?
As a musician using a laptop rig to do gigs (late-2013 MBP), I very much rely on my machine to earn an income (although that's not happening right now of course). I usually stick with an OS that gives me the most stable-running rig for my gigs, usually for a long time. I went from 10.9 to 10.11 to 10.14 and will stay here a while as I have 32-bit code hanging around in some of my music apps. When I update, I do a fresh install on a separate partition or external disk, load up the software I need to make my meager living, and run it for a while like that to make sure everything is hunky-dory. If everything checks out, then I update my internal SSD.
There is also the idea of cloning your startup partition to an external before you do an update. It's unclear if the bricking described in this article makes it impossible to option-start the affected machine from a clone though.
I do agree, as I tried to make clear in my previous posts, that people who rely on their Macs for their livelihood, as a general rule, shouldn't upgrade their OS on day one.
(FYI I'm also still on 10.14 on my MBP because I need/want continued access to 32 bit apps.)
My points were that:
1. While (most) power users understand the "don't upgrade a machine you depend on with a day one major OS upgrade unless you can afford to deal with some problems" a lot of less tech savvy people, who are more likely to be influenced by Apple's marketing and or macOS's
system level nagging, don't, and will just upgrade without fully understanding the risks.
2. These kinds of users are precisely the people who are most likely to be new to working from home and not used to managing their own machine without an IT department looking over their shoulder / restricting their ability to inflict self harm.
3. Bugs may be "normal," on day one but bricking Macs such that even power users may struggle to / cannot repair them without bringing them in to an Apple store is unacceptable and outside the range of "launch day bugs."
4. The above is particularly egregious coming in the middle of a worsening pandemic where we really don't need a bunch of panicked users crowding into an Apple Store to have their machine fixed.
In the end, I also can't help but feel that the whole "blame the victim" mentality at work here and elsewhere whenever a new OS (or software version) has a problem or breaks something speaks to a real failure to hold Apple (and MS, etc) accountable. Yes, mistakes happen and beta testers/QA can't catch everything but blaming end users for upgrading on day one when they're specifically, repeatedly, told and encouraged to "upgrade to the latest macOS" (its one of the first things AppleCare will ask if you call them with a problem) seems wrong. The blame lies with Apple and while we should encourage less tech savvy users to observe best practices, anyone whose ever worked in IT knows how hard that is.