As someone who was annoyed by it at the time, I don't think it's a good example of that.

This was in an era of much more limited upstream bandwidth. The p2p nature was obscured from non-technical users in some implementations. So on and so on. I'm sure there are plenty of writeups from that era detailing why it was a bad idea.

These companies already used capable CDNs to distribute patches. It was a way for them to shift their CDN bill onto their paying customers.