I concur. I've seen a lot of companies outside the techbro world where the entire thing runs on a single VPS/dedicated server with a setup that would make any sysadmin squirm. And yet, it just works and makes them money?

Which isn't too surprising - hardware is extremely reliable nowadays. When's the last time your laptop broke? And that laptop lives a much harsher life than server HW in a datacenter. Obviously everyone is going to have their own anecdotes about this, but I think it's fair to say that overall the failure rates are quite low.

You know why their (often awful) setups work and consistently beat the major clouds in terms of uptime? No moving parts for K8s and all the "best practices", and most importantly, there is nobody "fixing" the working setup until it doesn't work. Ironically they are getting better uptime by avoiding all the things that are marketed as improving uptime.