This was the right decision and this precedent may protect others in the future but Ms. Tyler won't benefit from it, in all likelihood.
In addition to the $15,000 that she owed for back taxes, it appears that she also had a $49,000 mortgage and owed $12,000 in unpaid HOA fees, which easily exceeded the market value of her property. That is why Hennipin County argued that she effectively abandoned the property when she walked away from it and stopped paying those outstanding debts.
I suspect that most of the time that a property is taken over for back taxes, the owner has little or no equity in the property, which is why they don't simply sell it, pay off their debts and keep any equity. It's a major pain for the government to have to take over an abandoned property and there is significant expense involved. In this case, the mortgage holder decided to write off the mortgage instead of foreclosing, since they were unlikely to recoup enough of their investment to make it worth their while, so it went to the County for back taxes.
While I think it's a good thing that the owner would get any equity over and above what the County is able to sell the property for, less the value of any costs incurred by the County to do so, I don't know that it's the Counties job to make any other lien holders whole.