Totally fair, awareness is a big thing too, fire crews are professionals so I do think they made the best choice with what they were given, every firefighter I’ve met will absolutely do an assessment before doing anything.
Don’t know their situation, were they just told vehicle fire not lithium fire? Maybe more lithium specific crews/equipment in the future, maybe battery compartments that can help contain? (As I said, with lithium batteries I’ve worked with in the past, pressure vessels, if they went off it was at least contained to inside that, they’d vent gasses still but at least the threat of fire was minimised)
Be really interested to know what it’s made out of. Had a coworker who used to work in forgings and did some stuff that got sent to nuclear plants, they said that they had really strict requirements on material compositions, specifically needed to ensure that the (think it was steel, may have been something else) material had basically no traces of cobalt in it because the cobalt would becomes radioactive over the service life.