[onion2k]

being asked to load test our system to make sure it can handle the load (of 3 people?)

The problematic load in a dashboard isn't users; it's querying the data sources to get up to date information. For example, if you're running a query to aggregate a bunch of things with lots of joins and that query takes 1.5s to run but your dashboard tries to run it every second so it can be 'real time' then you're in for a bad time even with just 1 user. You absolutely need to load test a dashboard application that's running against production data.

being asked to integrate with various analytics platforms so we can alert some poor schmuck at 3 AM in case the API goes down then (it's not a vital part of any platform)

It might not be vital right now, but if you make a dashboard for it then it'll quickly become vital. Putting metrics in front of people focuses them on those metrics...

[Sammi]

I've downvoted your answer here as I think it is a ungenerous interpretation of the post you replied to.

It's just as likely that OP did already know that what you are insisting on is not relevant to their use case. That might be why they stated it.