I think you're both talking about different ideas here. Efficiency is good. But redundancy is also good (necessary, even, for a resilient system), and the problem is that you can always increase efficiency by removing redundancy, so it does get removed by short-sighted efficiency-optimizers.

Topically, in the past week we've seen two giant companies, Adobe and Canon, lose unimaginable amounts of user data. If they had had backups, which are a form of redundancy, this would not have been a problem. But the backups were too expensive--too inefficient--and so now customer trust in their service is absolutely destroyed.