I'm wondering if they seriously expected it to blow up on the pad, which by all accounts is now in need of a bit of refurbishing. Normally a launch pad has a flame trench and deluge system to contain all the FIRE...
Still, the booster, which has never flown before, did an admirable job - plusminus the six engines that shut down for some reason. It's probably not the booster's fault that it didn't really know what to do with itself after staging failed (and presumably they let it spin around for a bit to collect data before hitting the Big Red Button).
We shouldn't underestimate how significant an innovation the Raptor engine actually is, and I don't think any of the Raptor 2s had actually flown before now?