I have never heard of a control plane before this AWS outage, sounds instructive without needing an explanation but for 1-2 person what does a control plane provide?
Anyone using AWS isn’t concerned with the physical :)
At the end of the day, AWS is still physically made up of physical computers that still have to obey the laws of physics. If you max out the bandwidth of the connection going in or out of, say, an RDS system (which is available via NDA if you are spending enough money with them), suddenly the physical is very important.