Being a rube isn't a great hobby either, that's why "fool me once ..." is a famous saying. As are the various versions of "who benefits?".
Pretty decent rules of thumb.
And at a higher level ... who cares if they did it maliciously or because they "panicked", you can't ever know that anyway and either one means you can predict what they will do in similar situations.
This isn't the first frivolous DMCA request GitHub complied with. A company owned by one of the largest tech companies in the world doesn't need to "panic" about something like this.