You would think the design would be along the lines of using power to keep the rods together to produce heat and once outage occures the rods would reseparate away from critical mass... much like when air goes out on a truck the breaks lock up.
The final containment pot of molten uranium, as you mention, is the ultimate “if all else fail” and would work, but I am surprized that it takes power to contain the problem. We should not have to send a guy down there to pull rods out.
There is no guy pulling out rods. The plant operators insert control rods to stop the reaction. (And they’re not physically doing so. It’s a mechanism that happens automatically in an emergency shutdown.)