> decoupled from the horrors of an unreliable network

There's no such thing as reliable network in the world. The world is network connected, there's almost no local-only systems anymore (for a long long time now).

Some engineers dream that there's some cases when network is reliable, like when a system fully lives in the same region and single AZ. But even then it's actually not reliable and can have some glitches quite frequently (like once per month or so, depending on some luck).