As to depending on other infrastructure and your earlier post about systemic dependencies and domino failures: the terminology that some engineers use is “firebreak”, that is build a system with enough dependency-breaking “firebreak” point that localized failure does not spread. The problem is that firebreaks cost money, and they don’t generate revenue, they just limit the damage when a failure happens.

The pen-wielders don’t that about failure if that does not affect them: when the systemic failure happens and the company (or the country) goes down, all they care about is the firebreak between that failure and their offshore bank accounts and mansions and ranches. When the big USA and UK banks failed in 2008 their CEOs and CFOs, who had run them for broke with all stops pulled and no firebreaks, all retired with dozens to hundreds of millions of wealth, which would have been smaller if they had run their banks with more firebreaks.

A guy with a way of thinking similar to yours (hope neither of you is offended!) despite a completely different background is NN Taleb, of “black swan” fame, who has recently written a book on “having skin in the game”, and blogs on the topic https://medium.com/incerto and indeed the pen wielders work hard to not have skin in the game, to put the firebreaks between themselves and the systems they manage, while designing those systems without internal firebreaks, to go for broke.