Sending emails to some big distros would still result with e.g. Gentoo not getting that info because they are not a big distro.
Not ideal, but also: shit happens? It's always a balancing act choosing the lesser of multiple evils and most of the time it seems to work ok-ish, which is probably the best we can hope for ;-P
For this specific "bug" they took care to not mention any security angle in the commit message, making it extremely hard for an outsider to even realize this was a critical patch. I assume this was because they wanted to push the fix without breaking embargo.