I think they just needed a quick and dirty solution that was good enough for a few days. They figured that for 1% failure per hour, they needed to kill x proces

I think they just needed a quick and dirty solution that was good enough for a few days. They figured that for 1% failure per hour, they needed to kill x processes every y minutes to keep ahead of the failures. I'm sure it would be much more efficient but also more complicated to try to target the specific failures, and the "good enough" solution was acceptable.