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Assuming you have queues and stuff that can hold the requests in the intermediary time. Some systems will just start dropping the data or crashing and loose data.

If you have a queue or something in the middle then the failure is potentially recoverable or never happens in the first place.

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Queues don't fix overload: https://ferd.ca/queues-don-t-fix-overload.html

It lowers the load if the consumer is able to process batches of requests efficiently (ex. for vector operations).

I don’t think anyone was suggesting that they did. (Seems like a bit of a strawman to me)

However they do allow you to smooth or average spikes that could otherwise be problematic.

In your articles analogy I am able to drain a pot of pasta down the sink even though I might not be able to pour the same pot down the drain.

The term here is literally queues, so yes, there's a queue in there. I.e. HornetQ, RabbitMQ etc. I'm talking about distributed systems that are built with queuing in mind and that analyze the specific use case to understand when it is OK to have a queue build up and when it isn't.

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