[DirkH]

I feel like all the BS we were taught about architecture design principles multi-AZ, failover strategies, graceful degradation etc was gaslighting us all into thinking any of out work on it actually matters.

This isn't true, but it feels like this when the entire engineering world order seems to actually run on single-point-of-failures where one CEO just messages another when some 3rd party is down. And reputational risk here is completely safeguarded because as long as everyone is down you are fine. Use a service everyone uses and it goes down = no reputational risk. Use a more robust architecture and make some mistake = massive reputational risk and everyone asks why you don't use what everyone else uses.

Blind leading the blind and all that.