You are absolutely correct but this distinction is getting less and less important, everything is using APIs nowadays, including lots of stuff that is utterly invisible until it goes down.

Sweden and the “Coop” disaster:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57707530

That because people trust and hope blindly. They believe IT is for saving money? It isn’t. They coupled their cash registers onto an American cloud service. The couldn’t even pay in cash.

It usually gets worse, when not outages happens for some time. Because that increases blind trust.

That a Swedish supermarket gets hit by a ransomware attack doesn't prove/disprove the overall stability of the internet, nor the fragility of the web.

> The internet seems resilient enough...

The word "seems" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

I don't wanna jinx anything, but yeah, seems. I can't remember a single global internet outage for the 30+ years I've been alive. But again, large services gone down, but the internet infrastructure seems to keep on going regardless.