This _is_ the meaningful stuff. Engineers might have the urge, but most don’t have the opportunity, because they need to focus on the currently fashionable framework.
A good rule of thumb regarding meaningful battles is to ignore everything promoted by companies like Google or Facebook - everything they do is either going to be abandoned in five years, or makes sense only in the context of solving problems nobody else have.
seems like something an engineer might fix on their own time if they were feeling feisty about the matter. Something tells me if it went on for 20 years it was an edge case that only very rarely came up and was mostly a non-issue.
I suspect it was definitely an issue, it’s just that most companies like Google don’t care about reliability, only availability, and it might just not show up in their stats.
A good rule of thumb regarding meaningful battles is to ignore everything promoted by companies like Google or Facebook - everything they do is either going to be abandoned in five years, or makes sense only in the context of solving problems nobody else have.