Not a complete whitewash. I feel this one provides hope for the willingness to learn from HF21 things they failed to learn from HF20.

"The challenges that have arisen out of hardforks has placed an abnormal, and unacceptable, burden on engineers. This is not only unfair to the engineers, but also leads to fear and anxiety about future hardforks. While Steem’s facility with respect to system upgrades is a feature we believe should be exploited, we must dedicate more effort to ensuring that this can be done in a way that sufficiently considers the psychological well being of not just engineers, but community members, stakeholders, users, exchanges and Witnesses."

As @justinw states "Mistakes can happen, but it is very important to make sure you aren't making the same mistakes twice.". While we could claim they did make the same mistake twice now, with both HF20 and HF21 failing to do sufficiently thorough testing and resulting in massive down time (from a HE perspective), you could also look at it that the mistake was that they aparently learned the wrong lesson(s) from HF21, and are now ready to learn the right lesson.

As I wrote in my response to @justinw, I think Steemit Inc should go visit a few modern HE shops and see how they deal with agile, testing and a CICD in a HE-DTAP setting. Part of their problem I think is that they believe they are somehow in close-to virgin territory when it comes to finding the golden balance between HE and agile paradigms because they are a blockchain shop. I think once they figure out they are not, they should be ready to lose what from a distance pretty much resembles high-school science project approach to deployment.