Here's the deal. Every pilot is trained in what to do for a runaway stabilizer condition. If you see the stabilizer acting strangely, you grab the stabilizer adjustment wheels and stop them from turning. You cut power, and then you manually dial the horizontal stabilizer trim back to a functional level.
What both groups of pilots did was to wait too long to try to disable the automatic controls. Had they reacted quickly, the planes would not have crashed. By the time they reacted, there was too much force on the Horizontal Stabilizer to move the trim wheels.
Bad sensors combined with not particularly good software, combined with supposedly trained pilots who did not react quickly enough to a runaway stabilizer condition.
“You don’t understand, man! A picture is worth 1000 words, and a video is worth a million words, so you’re only getting 0.00000005%, so if someone on Youtube says the Martians are .... wait, what were we talking about?”
I posted it from Wimp.com, not Vox.
If the source is Vox, that’s on them and not me.
The explanation provided in the video seemed reasonable enough that I didn’t see problem with it.
The pilots may not have been able to disable the automatic software, because Boeing was trying to minimize pilot error.