[bradjohnson]

You're assuming a stateful system where the state is distributed throughout the components of the system. For a stateless component of a distributed system, you don't need redundancy to recover from an outage.

>likelihood of failure is statistically higher because of the higher number of components

Yes, absolutely true, but resiliency for a distributed system is not necessarily like your example of data stripped without parity, unless we're specifically talking about distributed storage.