I think this is covered in the blog post, but I'll take another stab at explaining it from my perspective:
Republishing was one of the options we were investigating early on. However, the problem is that it only fixes things once you check for and install the updated version signed with the new certificate. Firefox would still have disabled your installed version that had an expired certificate.
Firefox checks for addon updates every 24 hours, but it checks in with Normandy every 6 hours. Thus once we had stopgap fixes shipping to users via Normandy, and a proper fix of a new Firefox release in progress, republishing addons wasn't necessary.
An update being deactivated doesn't trigger an update check for said addon? Well, complexity of a graceful update attempt for a not loadable addon probably outweighs the benefit of such rare cases.
But the main reason I had a hard time with you guys discarding this path is probably addon stats like [0]. The spike in downloads made me think it could have helped at least some users. But on second thought, it might also have been caused by extensions getting re-enabled post fix. 2m downloads at 4m DAU makes me guess this was caused by something automatic.
Republishing was one of the options we were investigating early on. However, the problem is that it only fixes things once you check for and install the updated version signed with the new certificate. Firefox would still have disabled your installed version that had an expired certificate.
Firefox checks for addon updates every 24 hours, but it checks in with Normandy every 6 hours. Thus once we had stopgap fixes shipping to users via Normandy, and a proper fix of a new Firefox release in progress, republishing addons wasn't necessary.
(Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla)