Time is the whole point though. Everyone was terrified and shutting their websites down because they believed the exploit would be running wild on the internet in between it hitting git and them being able to update the server.
If it takes a week to come up with a working exploit code, the critical services have time to update.
But just because there isn't a working PoC on GitHub doesn't mean there isn't one and things aren't been actively exploited.
If you are a bad actor you probably don't share your PoC around as it means less boxes to hit.
AI makes developing this exploit faster though
With AI i think it's safe to assume it would only take hours after you give it what/where to look
That "if" is load bearing and increasingly flat-out false.
Crowdstrike's average "breakout times", the time gap between a first successful infiltration and maximal exploitation, has gone from days or hours prior to 2024 to minutes or seconds now.
Time is part of the point, but it is not the whole point. The whole point involves the fact that this impacts two decades worth of PHP versions. Even if it took months to exploit, there is going to be a long, long tail of breaches against ill-maintained legacy sites.