As systems become very large, ‘turn it off and back on again’ is often counter-productive to the point of being the most destructive thing you can do. Repairing state is slow and expensive, and meanwhile the world is happening. This is the reason why all ultra-scale systems use some kind of “k-safety” durability model. The system would effectively be unrecoverable if you actually rebooted it because it would struggle to get back online. This is increasingly the rule rather than the exception for data infrastructure.

Even in the handful of recent systems I worked on where there was an explicit external system of record and rebooting was an option operationally and technically achievable, we still had to do semi-exotic custom engineering to make sure it was practically achievable.

When I started in the industry, ‘turn it off and back on again’ was the default strategy. These days it is rightly reserved for the dwindling number of cases, outside of small systems, where it still works. The computational cost of restarting is prohibitive.