Sorry for the ignorance but what's an order drop?
If you were running a business and suddenly started losing a million dollars a minute, wouldn't you like to have someone investigate why that's happening?
I mean, I'm not going to go to bat for Amazon's worker practices, but... how would you get a human in the loop for a basic sanity check without someone getting paged?
Like, you have to alert someone so that they can do a sanity check.
I don't know which model Amazon uses myself, but it sounds more like the "everyone is their own first responder" model which surprises me a little, but each model has its pros and cons. The justification I'm most familiar with is "if there's a separate ops team you're going to be complacent and throw shit over the wall without caring about quality" which is a somewhat lazy excuse for not actually getting your engineers to care about quality with anything but a hammer to beat them on the head with, but ....
I believe order drops are looked at by dedicated reliability team, because it's such a significant problem. But they don't watch graphs because... why would they? They set up the machines to page them when metrics aren't within an expected range. Which is what happened.
The ops teams I've worked with watched graphs because (a) sometimes you see interesting changes or trends before they turn into actionable alerts and people can look into them/figure them out before shit's on fire, and (b) it makes it look more like you're doing something when everything is smooth sailing and not actively on fire, solving the "wait why are we paying for this if it doesn't take us long to respond to incidents anyway" naive-meddlesome-exec problem.
It is possible to have someone who can say "oh there's a world shaking event in Japan" before paging engineers.
In fact, wouldn't this be an obvious efficiency improvement at world-wide scale?
It is also possible someone believes that is possible without them being a "negative cynic".
In fact, it's unclear why having this idea for an efficiency improvement would make one a "negative cynic"
I suggest coming with curiosity and asking why people believe something rather than working towards explaining what it says about people if they actually believe exactly what your mindreading says they do.