Well, back to the movie....
I saw it in the theater when it originally came out, and I was less nuclear educated than I am now (or I would have been snickering a LOT more), and while everybody seemed agahst at the ending, my take was that while the greedy bean counters had pushed the equipment beyond any reasonable limits, the engineers that designed it and the hardhats that had put it together had won out since the mistreated equipment had done what was needed, and it was now time to roast the bean counters on a slowly rotating spit over a low fire.
For a REALLY scary real-life account of a reactor accident in 1961, google sl-1 idaho. It was over in milliseconds....
And as for the initial China syndrome premise, there are always solutions, and to understand how narrow a range of conditions are necessary to get it to happen and STAY happening (melt, not vaporize and disperse) gets me
: almost as steamed as their little horror story....