What I remember is that the ping of death was extremely surprising in terms of the number of OSes affected, the ease of exploiting it, and the super-noticeable consequence of instantly crashing the target machine. And it came out at a time when there wasn't as much vulnerability research and very few extensively cross-platform vulnerabilities.

Also, with the ping of death, the only way to use it was to very noticeably crash systems -- not to secretly build a botnet or something, as might have been done with RCE vulnerabilities.