Is it really implausible that employees of a company with a history of toxic labor relations and such a stellar reputation for apathetic customer-facing employees and poor service culture would overreact in a situation like this? I don't think so.

This whole incident smells. Apparently the passenger was enough of a threat to the aircraft to have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars offloading, but not enough of a threat to go to the nearest airfield, or restrain, or be met by airport police in Newark. I'm setting aside any wild speculations of fighters being scrambled over an unruly/disruptive passenger. If that happened on anything resembling a regular basis, there wouldn't be nearly enough fighters around the world for Air Forces to deal with real threats.

Sounds like this is an "....... meets ......." incident.