It might take less resource today though to achieve the same, I agree with that.
10 years ago I was working for a company that provided a financial OLTP service. We had to invest a huge amount of money to be able to provide a reasonable HA architecture, and to be able to meet 4 hour DR SLAs, and we still had weekly maintenance outages. The amount of effort required to accomplish those service levels today is comparatively trivial, and you could reasonably expect even a low-budget one person operation to be able to exceed them.
You’d expect a service outage to be a significant public controversy today for a lot of companies. It’s never been a good thing, but we’ve come a long way from it being a completely routine event for most services. Especially given the explosion in online services.
I don’t agree with this at all. Reliability in practice is improving at a phenomenal pace. 10 years ago maintenance outages were a normal feature of every service, and unplanned outages were perfectly ordinary occurrences. Consumers today expect a much higher level of availability and reliability, which they receive rather consistently. Today it takes much less resource to produce a much more reliable system then you would have been able to produce in the rather recent past.