S3 is beyond impressive, but how many workloads truly need that? I’ve never had a single instance of data loss on a NetApp or Pure array.
Truly need, I don't know. But customers will request (and pay for) the 9's.
I suppose it’s like how someone who’s already made up their mind to buy a Lamborghini never questions whether they really need a 800HP engine.
On the other hand you have transient failures in the cloud (at least on Azure - this behavior is even documented) so does that count towards the 99.99999%?