Not everyone that starts a business has a sysops background. Especially long enough ago when people still trusted Google.
My grandmother is now 82 years old, she has lived her entire life on a farm in rural New Zealand. She had not used a computer until she was in her early 70's, and she is now computer literate enough to know to backup her data to an external drive and does so regularly.
It's 2022. You dont need to "have a sysops background" to know or be able to backup your data.
It was not 2022 when this story happened.
The cost of backups also depends on your income. Stories like this led to more backups, but so did going from being a student, to first-job-out-of-college, to a senior employee.
There's a spectrum between a hard drive costing a full day's work at minimum wage to a few minutes work for a Googler, Amazonian, or a Metamate making $500k/year.
Failures happen, disks get corrupted, bugs wipe stuff, cloud providers terminate idle accounts, failures happen everywhere in life.
Back up your stuff and have a plan B.