They knew exactly what they were supposed to do up until Boeing did not tell them about the roller coaster maneuver. The fault occurred 10 seconds into the flight. At that point all pilots are trained to get that plane away from the ground. They focused on doing that by the time the plane was far enough away from the ground or would have been absent the MCAS issue MCAS had already moved the stabilizer so far they could not recover without the roller coaster.

Avoiding this accident would have either required the automatic stabilizer trim control to be turned off completely from the start of the flight, or it would have required a superhuman reaction because that close to the ground, you have to focus on getting the airplane away from the ground before you can deal with the stabilizer run away. They dealt with the stabilizer runaway properly, but because of how long had to elapse before they could address the runway, they could not recover it without the roller coaster maneuver that Boeing specifically did not tell them about.

They had the stabilizer runaway cut out within one minute. The problem is that was still enough time that they could not recover without a maneuver that they knew nothing about and Boeing did not tell anyone about. And the reason it took even that long to cut it out is because it took them that long to identify that it was an MCS runaway and not a normal runway, because the MCAS runway starts and stops and a normal runway doesn’t. And when we compare that flight with the lion air flight, it appears to be that you really do just need that much time to identify the MCAS runway because it is just different enough than a normal runway.