You have managed to capture the spirit of the post. The goal was to highlight areas where developers can take action, and how improving even the little things can go a long way to improving the entire system -- even the one you can't see.
In the early parts of my career I would often take pride in building complex systems to accommodate for misbehaving applications. Throw in some fancy Nagios alerts and a sleep depriving on-call rotation; I looked like a hero.
Then I learned how to write code.
This was the turning point in my career (2006). I was now brave enough to modify "legacy" production applications to take advantage of "new" infrastructure features like service discovery (use DNS records instead of IPs), and logging directly to syslog (asynchronously with proper ring buffers).
I was willing to learn any language too: Python, PHP, or Java, it did not matter because it allowed me to take action and contribute at the heart of the application.
I'm not saying platforms that also handle "misbehaving" applications or complex failure scenarios are unnecessary. I just consider those platforms as extra layers of protection, not a free pass to ignore building applications that take responsibility for reliability from startup to shutdown.