Yes, that's it exactly. Weaponized incompetence.
I do hope someone outside of her questionable inner circle is checking on the children. I imagine their therapist will note what her decision to skip the hearing and aftermath has done to their ability to feel safe and overall well being.
I find her behavior so utterly perplexing.
I feel like this was one of the main reasons my narc ex got away with so much stuff - the games he played, the lies he told, they were just so bizarre and perplexing, so nonsensical and pointless on the surface to normal people that it becomes genuinely unbelievable. When I tried confiding in one work friend, I felt like she didn't believe me for a long time, until she saw for herself what he was really like after she was affected herself by some of his lies. Once you've experienced a narc, the narc playbook becomes pretty obvious - many people on these threads with far greater (sadly) experience than my own with narcs can read and predict AE very accurately, but I found for those who hadn't had real experience with them, a narcs behaviour is just so batshit crazy (though not actually insane Imo) that it's just completely surreal and sometimes outright impossible for healthy people to understand or accept until they experience it themselves.
(Sorry, I'm not sure I'm explaining myself very well. It's nearly 7am here, I've been up since yesterday and I'm suddenly so tired I feel like I'm trying to swim through porridge!)
ETA: Just wanted to add that I was very lucky and only experienced 3 years with my narc ex, 1 1/2 years of which was just friends. Probably I'm just really naïve but honestly, so much of AE's behaviour still shocks the hell out of me! I know she does nothing without a reason, and nothing that won't benefit her sooner or later, no matter how kind and generous it may look on the surface, but I think a lot of what she does is so egregious and vile that most people can't understand how someone can plunge to those depths unless they are capable of that same type of behaviour.