Isn't east one the "core" datacenter and also the oldest? I'd imagine it has more load than the other regions and also has more tech debt and architectural / engineering debt because they had less experience when they built it. Also iirc some services rely on east-1 as a single point of failure for configuration (like IAM or some S3 stuff?)
Yes it tends to have the most things running in it, including backbone and internal services that only exist in that region.
What I have seen at other companies is that the older datacenters have suboptimal designs which are impossible to fix after the fact.