The sheer banality of the situation is astounding.

That's the big problem with anything involving feeback loops. There is a domain where it's unstable and then a small change can cause big and surprisingly rapid effects. Nature is full of such tricky stuff and there is unfortunately no manual so we are learning a lot of this stuff by experiencing it first hand.

Analogy time:

You use a wooden chair for reaching up in high places. Imagine you're a short person and utterly dependent on this chair. It works for 20 year, and it helps you reach what you need in all that time. You never notice much except for some familiar creaking. The chair works every time, and you just take it for granted as a handy tool to have around.

But when the wood in that chair snaps, it happens all at once. Even if just a single part of that chair momentarily fails. Gravity, leverage, falling backwards with no way to protect your head. And it happens so fast, there's no time to think about it while it happens.

Luckily your husband put a cushion on the floor exactly where you'd fall with your neck, because he anticipated this happening. He just didn't know when it'll happen.

You wake up a bit dazed, and a bit wiser to how the world works. How fragile and complex systems can fail all at once and too fast.

Analogy time:

You fall, and the floor gives way. You plummet through the floor, down to the basement, and sever an artery on the way down.

All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again.