Over-reliance on single nodes ...
... is always, always, always an amateurish, blinkered, cheapskate, short-sighted, fundamentally stupid thing to do. It is, as such, the almost exclusive province of the inexperienced, bean-counters and senior management (and of course, politicians, who somehow manage to embody all the vices and weaknesses of humanity in one shoddy package).
And yet, when you are as old as I am, a kind of wry despair sets in as you watch each new generation sprout its own collection of boneheads who, when not eagerly snuffling after the latest vacuous fad (be it cloud or CRM or AI) and proudly strutting their "knowledge" of "innovative new thing" via endless Death by Powerpoint, confidently assert their brilliance by cutting costs—two of the most fashionable tactics being, One, to discard experienced, knowledgeable staff, and Two, to cut away the "dead wood" of backup, redundancy, testing, failover, recovery, distributedness, re-resting and all the things one might classify as "engineering common sense".
The amateurs should never be allowed to make decisions, but as I'm sure El Reggers are well placed to know, IT is infested with cowboys. The UK is a particular problem—Germans tend not to tolerate this kind of nonsense—and the US isn't far behind. The proportion of arrogant bullshitters spouting terms they read in the trade press yesterday is positively frightening.
Bean-counters ... well, ugh. When you love beans, I guess they are the only thing you care about, and it's a short step to seeing the world only through the rails of an abacus. Perhaps they are the one group we should have some sympathy with; they can't help the blinkers, and probably feel more comfortable with them on: saves having to deal with messy, smelly human beings.
As for senior management—here is where most political vices accrete like a kind of evil booger, and the higher up you go, the ranker the canker. A combination of dishonesty, greed, varying levels of sociopathy and the political DNA that values style over substance, propaganda over fact, is the most fertile possible ground for mendacious short-sightedness and eventual disaster.
The same mental and moral weakness is visible again and again. All part of the spectrum of folly. Whether it's DC-10 cargo doors; Shuttles killing entire crews; idiots advocating adding yet more runways to already critical airport nodes like Heathrow; or a mild enough example from this bonehead at Oracle ... people just never learn. At least Oracle's transparent moonshine won't kill people; let's be grateful for that.