It is not suicidal, but probably worthy of a honorable mention in the annual Darwin Awards roundup since it was a very bad judgement on his part.
As an engineer - he should have known better than to continue to use the feature the moment it became unreliable for reasons unknown. Those kind of failure modes are extremely devious killers.
This is exactly what the navy did when the bsod parked that destroyer in a harbour 20 years ago.
When you have mission critical pieces of software (aka stuff that kills you) starting to behave in unexpected ways with unknown failure modes you stop using it asap until fixed.
I will gladly continue using my bsoding pc for gaming, but I won't use it in data center or to control a shuttle launch.
If a person uses gas oven that leaks from time to time and only a bit - how will you classify him.
As an engineer - he should have known better than to continue to use the feature the moment it became unreliable for reasons unknown. Those kind of failure modes are extremely devious killers.