I doubt that at any point in these pilots' training have they been placed in a situation where their corrective actions did not work, nor have they been trained to deal with it. I imagine this is what is meant by common failure mode.
Even after 2 minutes, if they'd started from square one, they could probably still have saved the aircraft.
This doesn't have to be as hard as my RAF Instructor who gave me the aircraft with a toppled horizon in a spin for an IF Unusual Attitude that was supposed to be full panel. But this, and other similar tricks (once is not enough), taught me to recognise when plan A wasn't working, and how to start again from scratch.
It would probably help in the civilian world if these things weren't graded either.