The important character here is the '>'. This redirects output to a file and overwrites the file. The lrwxrwxrwx will only print an error, but the redirect to the target executable will erase the target.
scp was in /usr/bin, so we could at least copy enough basics from another system and recover the rest from a backup. Needless to say we lost the client contract.
For example:
So basically, this zero'd out every executable on the system.