Did the manner in which the meat servo manipulated the controls play a significant role in the mishap? Yes? Then it's pilot error. Stop beating a dead horse. Pilot error is a term of art in the aviation community. I'm sorry if some civilians are butt-hurt by it.
Let's put it another way. Say you're in a King Air taking off and you have a single-engine failure. You goon up the abort and ball the plane up at the departure end. PILOT ERROR. But if the engine hadn't failed you wouldn't have crashed. Tough. It doesn't mean you're a bad person, or even, depending on the circumstances, a bad pilot, just that someone who had applied procedures properly would've not crashed the plane.
Whether "VRS" caused the crash or not, the Marana crew entered a high ROD profile at low airspeed close behind another aircraft. That's bad juju in anything.
BTW, the 40KIAS VRS limit doesn't exist because VRS starts there--it starts there because pitot-static instruments don't give accurate indications below 40KIAS, so that's why most r/w manuals say to avoid high RODs below that airspeed. If one can recover from VRS with power, per the 53 example above, one wasn't in VRS to start with.