But I also think that many applications are far more tolerant of small outages than you imply. And a more complex setup also adds more points that can lead to an outage even though it reduces the chance that hardware will cause one.
I kinda want to know where you shop, because commodity hardware has a reputation as just utter crap. Before cloud went mainstream, I worked somewhere that had some racked servers in a colo literally catch fire. (The remote hands put them out, disconnected, and refused to touch them ever again.)
If you are in one of those two categories then setting up something more robust than a single server isn’t much more complicated than a single server.
That is to say, I think it very much does change the equation around the original statement.