The angle grinders stuff was confirmed by NYTimes. Everything else was rank speculation by people who admitted as such. No one was passing off a hostile attack as fact.
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I think you mean repeated uncritically by NYT. It doesn't even make sense, as reported. Yes, maybe to get into the cage in a shared DC, but not individual servers, and it turns out neither was necessary. That's a rehash of an old Google story.
Another bit of misreporting (e.g. The Verge) is that this was "one of its main US data centers in California" when there's no such thing. The seriously big heaps of hardware are elsewhere and they're not shared, so there are no cages to force entry into. I've been in one; no cages in sight. I know which facility they're talking about, and its only distinguishing characteristic is that it's close to where relevant people live.
And then retracted by NYT:
> Correction: Oct. 4, 2021. An earlier version of this article misstated a Facebook team’s means of getting access to server computers at a data center in Santa Clara, Calif. The team did not have to cut through a cage using an industrial angle grinder.
Even if it wasn't true, drilling out locks or cutting them with tools is a pretty standard way of dealing with a lock you can't open. In an emergency where lots of things were broken it would be a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Also a news source with a nontechnical reporter might say the wrong thing that would indicate somebody was opening a server chassis with a powertool.