It might have been the original idea (though taken into account the time period and context, I suspect we're missing possible overfocus on deployment by AWS ASG and smallish set of services).
What grinds my gears is that over years I found it a thought limiting meme - it effectively swings a metaphor too hard into one direction, and some early responses under original article IMO present quite well the issue. It's not like people are stupid - but metaphors like this exist to make shortcuts for thinking and discussion, and for last few years I've seen that it short-circuits the discussion too hard, making people either stop thinking about certain interdependencies, or stopping noticing that there are still systems they treat like "pets", just named differently and in different scope, but now mentally pushing out how fragile they can be.
What grinds my gears is that over years I found it a thought limiting meme - it effectively swings a metaphor too hard into one direction, and some early responses under original article IMO present quite well the issue. It's not like people are stupid - but metaphors like this exist to make shortcuts for thinking and discussion, and for last few years I've seen that it short-circuits the discussion too hard, making people either stop thinking about certain interdependencies, or stopping noticing that there are still systems they treat like "pets", just named differently and in different scope, but now mentally pushing out how fragile they can be.