It seems to me that some incredibly clever men - the engineers and designers at Boeing and Rolls Royce - put an incredibly large number of hours into coming up with a system that would give crews fair warning of a technical situation requiring crew action. Those same smart people, with a commercial product to sell to airlines - airlines with a primary mission of getting passengers to their destinations safely and if possible, without UNNECESSARY delay, came up with a system that advised crews of any degradation to their aircraft's (usually triply redundant) systems that did NOT require crew action.
During my training on the 777, it was stressed that we should not try to outguess the systems - and definitely not act upon any status message. Status messages are just that, STATUS messages, which, translated for those who need translation, means "a syatem (or systems) is (or are) not operating at 100%, but we, the men who designed this aircraft, after many hours of careful consideration and with many, many hours of deliberation - and much, much more information than you, the operating crew (and the Monday morning quarterbacks) can ever hope to have available to you - have come to the conclusion that those systems haven't degraded to the point where crew action is necessary".
If a crew found themselves departing their home port bound for an outport that provided less technical support or spares than the home port did, (or if the problem seemed to indicate that the aircraft might be AOG for as considerable time), it would be entirely reasonable, if, after consultation with maintenance and operations, the crew elected to return to base. In such circumstances, that decision would be primarily commercial, and I can see no problem with that.
Like 99% of others who've posted here, I don't have all the information on this incident, but from the limited information I've seen here, and with 12 years as a captain on the 777 behind me, I can't see that the crew did anything wrong.