This is a neat line of thought, but I don't think it can go very far. There is a huge difference in reliability and predictability between small-scale and large-scale systems. One way to see this is to look at power supplies. Two ICs on the same board can be running off of the same 3.3V supply, and will almost certainly have a single upstream AC connection to the mains. When thinking about communications between the ICs, you don't have to consider power failure because a power failure will take down both ICs. Compare this to a WiFi network where two devices could be on separate parts of the power grid!
Other kinds of failures are rare enough to be ignored completely for most applications. An Ethernet cable can be unplugged. A PCB trace can't.
I used to work with a low-level digital communication protocol called I²C. It's designed for communication between two chips on the same board. There is no defined timeout for communication. A single malfunctioning slave device can hang the entire bus. According to the official protocol spec, the recommended way of dealing with this is to reset every device on the bus (which may mean resetting the entire board). If a hardware reset is not available, the recommendation is to power-cycle the system! [1]
Now I²C is a particularly sloppy protocol, and higher-level versions (SMBus and PMBus) do fix these problems, so this is a bit of an extreme example. But the fact that I²C is still commonly used today shows how reliable a small-scale electronic system can be. Even at the PC level, low-level hardware faults are rare enough that they're often indicated only by weird behavior ("My system hangs when the GPU gets hot"), and the solution is often for the user to guess which component is broken and replace it.
[1] Section 3.1.16 of https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/user-guide/UM10204.pdf