Lets skip the hyperbole, appeals to authority and platitudes. This crash is from handwritten API response wrapping code that lacks checks. This is string-based programming. This is utter shit.
Ok, I'm sure you've written perfect code your entire career and have never made a single mistake, however simple, and however early in your career. Right?
If you want to criticize something, criticize the testing that let this change through, not the developer who made it. We were all young and inexperienced once, we've all had bad days, and we've all written crap code. This is only unique because it affected a lot of people.
Without staking my flag on either side of this argument, it's a bit silly to say "the only reason this stands out is because it affected so many people" as if that's a reasonable counter-argument.
The large amount of people affected reinforces your parent comment's argument. Something that has the potential to affect an immense amount of people should be treated with a relative amount of care. Writing crap code and pushing carelessly would be a far more significant failure of judgement if that code were in the Facebook SDK than if it were in Johnny's Hello World App.
It's also worth noting the difference between writing code with a minor change in behavior that when pushed to production causes an unexpected domino-effect of obfuscated cascading failures across multiple different services that eventually impacts an immense amount of people, vs. directly writing code that crashes on the client side and impacts an immense amount of people. This is the latter.
Why was the testing not sufficient? Was it even tested at all? Maybe a developer just "pushed it straight to master"? Why/how can they do that (hypothetically)
