very much do not think the crew ever knew they had stalled.
I agree. I was reading the vanity fair article (excellent btw) and it was mentioned how the stall alarm cuts out at obscenely high AoA. This created a situation where Bonin would lower the nose and the stall alarm would kick in again, adding further confusion and loss of confidence in the instrumets I'm sure.
It's also an interesting inight into system design. It might work perfectly for all sensible flight regions, but there's always that 1 untested case where a fault in the logic appears.