> Later in private several people were disgruntled and claimed the person only had to do so because they had messed it up before despite being told to use a different approach repeatedly.

This sounds like every tech company ever. I used to excitedly watch youtube videos about the extreme measures startups took to scale to "massive" amounts of traffic while undergoing huge growth spurts.

Now I just kind of roll my eyes and think "Yeah, obviously a message bus in a relational databse using rails wasn't the optimal solution for scaling that app".

In the real world emergencies happen. The unexpected happens. But the truth is that if you actually prepare and have been around the block once or twice, they don't happen all that often. And when they do, there's usually a handy little knob to ameliorate the issue.