In fact, CrowdStrike has taken down Linux systems in much the same way in the past year (in April I think). It's just that the impact was less widespread.
Linux yes, but *BSD systems have microkernel architecture, so must be more resilient to failures of one of the components. Although I have no idea whether the full system would boot either, I'm pretty sure it could partially load, give more information to user, and make it easier to fix.