And we are unfortunate in another respect: due to a misunderstanding of what has happened here, we may see a decline in admins having private conversations with friends to "sanity check" things, and we may see a decline in thoughtfully coordinated on-wiki actions. And that's a shame.
Indeed. A lot of people seem to thing the options are "discuss in private" and "discuss in public", and given those options, public discussion is preferred. However, the issue arises in cases where public discussion isn't an option at all for whatever reason, so the actual options are "discuss in private" and "don't discuss at all and act unilaterally". Given those options, private discussions are obviously a good thing.