What about using a relay as a temporary solution to remotely turn it off instead of physically yanking the cable?
Maybe that's good enough for them, people never touch this problem again, and we wouldn't have this story (which of course would be sad). But it occurs to me that the author wasn't in a rush to fix this and had plenty of time to poke around. I wish I could do that.
Speaking as a "maker," you can find on AliExpress a fairly generic relay board that's controlled by a logic signal. That, and a cheap microcontroller board, are a super useful problem solver.
Maybe that's good enough for them, people never touch this problem again, and we wouldn't have this story (which of course would be sad). But it occurs to me that the author wasn't in a rush to fix this and had plenty of time to poke around. I wish I could do that.