[mjr00]

I'm former AWS. Yes, it's true. You'd be surprised how much human intervention is needed for large-scale SaaS/cloud stuff. A lot of it's just scale and probability. If an IT problem has a 0.0001% chance of happening on any given day for an org, a single organization will likely never see it happen during its entire existence. But if you're managing IT for 10 million organizations, it'll statistically happen 10 times per day!

Giant tech companies do obsess about reducing the need for human intervention. Teams in my org at AWS kept track of failures/intervention rates per thousand instances. If it gets too high, it means you're spending too much engineering effort resolving on-call issues and need to fix it.