The article is in Germany for me so I've only read a part of it before I got tired of trying to read German, but I think they mention as one of the first things

The article is in Germany for me so I've only read a part of it before I got tired of trying to read German, but I think they mention as one of the first things that what you describe, preventing an overload in the first place, is their primary strategy. The request dropping (less jargon-y and more descriptive than "load shedding", which refers to consuming more rather than less) only kicks in when that fails or isn't fast enough.