That means AWS is doing it right, though

Or just not as badly.

at something AWS scale something is always on fire, they probably measure disk head crashes per second, and they're supposed to insulate it from their clients with layers of redundancy. If those layers are working, they're doing it okay.

Above those layers is a ton of jank, e.g. Elastic Beanstalk. But my understanding is the fundamentals on AWS - compute, storage, networking - are pretty much rock-solid.

Fair.

Can you clarify what you mean? Do you work there, or have you had negative experiences as a customer?

Disclosure: I work at AWS, at the core EC2 dataplane, no less. We monitor our production environment very aggressively with very tight SLAs, and our technical leadership is competent as well.

The petrol in a four stroke internal combustion engine is on fire all the time too. The important part is nobody notices.