I have some good experience and I feel bad about state of these things too specially given that a lot of it could have been prevented. What you have here is not a single service, its a system compromised of hundreds of services, possibly without clear ownership for some of them after these many years and reorgs. There is not a single person or group that understands the whole system from technical standpoint and pressure points. It akin to people trying to plug the holes as the water starts getting under pressure from different joints. This duct taping is present in almost all big enough systems, you name them.

> "No one takes chances with critical components" is also very wrong for the simple fact that you don't know which is the weakest link in the chain until it fails.

  These companies were built and run by people passionate enough for the craft, ones who cared for the systems, who designed them. There is this idea that you can replace people by process and everyone is replaceable. What you have is a classical state where people are just doing their time.