You’re both wrong (maybe?)… ext3 is coping the best it can with having its underlying storage removed so abruptly.
Your SSD probably has some type of onboard cache. You don’t mention the make/model of SSD in use, but this sounds like a consumer-level SSD versus an enterprise or industrial-grade model.
Either way, the cache is used to help coalesce writes and prolong the life of the drive. If there are writes in-transit, the sudden loss of power is definitely the source of your corruption. True enterprise and industrial SSD’s have supercapacitors that maintain power long enough to move data from cache to nonvolatile storage, much in the same way battery-backed and flash-backed RAID controller caches work.
If your drive doesn’t have a supercap, the in-flight transactions are being lost, hence the filesystem corruption. ext3 is probably being told that everything is on stable storage, but that’s just a function of the cache.