I disagree. It appears it occurred to someone (the jump seat pilot) pretty quickly that it was a runaway. They got pitch under control and hit the cutouts. My guess is they re-enabled stab trim in a troubleshooting / curiosity activity (lets see if its still doing it?) because clearly they did not need the electric trim to fly the plane.
I'm not quite sure why this myth that the previous Lion Air crew quickly realized they had a stabilizer runaway and used the cutout switches is still going strong.
It's obvious from the FDR traces that is not the case, and that they actually fought MCAS for about 5 minutes before using the stab trim cutout switches. For the Ethiopian flight, 4 minutes after they experienced the first MCAS activation they were already hitting the ground.
And the Ethiopian crew used the cutout switches about 40 seconds after MCAS first activated. So about 7 times faster than the Lion Air crew. It still didn't save them. In fact it may have made things worse for them, because it appears that they could not use either the manual electric trim or the trim wheels after using the cutout switches.
I was trying to understand why the Ethiopian pilots have retracted the flaps, which allowed MCAS to activate. Looking at their FDR traces it seems to have happened when they were getting close to 250 knots. The VFE on the 737-800 is 250 KIAS at flaps 1, 2 and 5, and it's probably similar on the MAX. So it's not surprising they retracted them. About 20 seconds later, when the flaps completed retraction, they were over 250 knots. I wonder what would have happened if they didn't retract them and they got close to 340 knots. Would they fully retract automatically at some point to prevent damage to them?