NATO, like every other organisation, is discussing things all the time. Article 4 is the equivalent of not just inviting to a meeting about about a topic but raising a formal JIRA ticket and invoking a formal process involving senior management to discuss the severity (and not the mere existence) of that ticket. So yeah, invoking an official article is a big deal, because it forces the whole of NATO to formally address this issue. No NATO member nation can easily weasel out of this now.
The formality had to be done. But the Article 4 invocation is not (I claim) itself a significant event.
To extend your analogy, this is like creating a JIRA ticket when your website with 100 million daily users suddenly goes offline. The shit has already hit the fan and it’s already all hands on deck.
