It's not that clear cut a problem. There seems to be two elements; the kernel driver had a memory safety bug; and a definitions file was deployed incorrectly, triggering the bug. The kernel driver definitely deserves a lot of scrutiny and static analysis should have told them this bug existed. The live updates are a bit different since this is a real-time response system. If malware starts actively exploiting a software vulnerability, they can't wait for distribution maintainers to package their mitigation - they have to be deployed ASAP. They certainly should roll-out definitions progressively and monitor for anything anomalous but it has to be quick or the malware could beat them to it.

This is more a code safety issue than CI/CD strategy. The bug was in the driver all along, but it had never been triggered before so it passed the tests and got rolled out to everyone. Critical code like this ought to be written in memory safe languages like Rust.