Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon

If you ask me, they gave up far too easily.

Did they try repeatedly extending and retracting the landing struts and blasting the RCS to try to upright it?

What about using the reaction wheels to roll it downhill and popping the struts right before the bottom to launch it back up and using RCS to ease it down? 1 times out of 10 in KSP, that works for me. That's why my later builds always tack on the robotic science arm to the base and use it to nudge it back up.