Adapting all our software for multi-region was an epic lift. Really, we had to stop thinking of it as "the backup datacenter" and instead run a portion of traffic there continuously. Most teams dragged their feet until we started weekly failover drills, which would usually break something in a big way. Application owners got embarrassed into compliance over the course of a few years. They're less exciting now, but still the proximate cause of some outages.
Given all that, I just can't imagine that a company which has never actually cut over (or attempts it only in quarterly/annual all-hands-on-deck events) is going to have a fun time when it becomes necessary to flip the switch for real. We fought tooth and nail to build this capability and it still takes balls of steel to press the button.
You’re right it’s not fun. It’s not easy. It’s all hands on deck at most companies. But disaster recovery isn’t something you can build after the fact so even a neglected DR solution is better than none. If a tornado or earthquake rips through your main DC, you’re not getting those machines or that data back. How much good that does depends on how much you like staying in business.
DR typically means your business is down and all hands bring it back at another location at bare minimum capacity just to keep money flowing.
I work as a security consultant and I've had companies tell me they can't plan on working from home because of culture issues (aka bosses want to see their employees in front of them). And yet all of them have disaster recovery datacenters or multi-zone cloud setups because they know inevitably a tornado or earthquake or fire or ice storm or something will impact their main datacenter. But no plans for their employees because of "culture".