Yep, in practice a lot of orgs treat reliability as a cost center until an outage becomes a headline or a regulatory incident. I’ve seen the same tension in payments/banking: product pressure wins until the risk is visible.

Part of why I like “make invalid states unrepresentable” approaches is exactly that: it’s one of the few reliability investments that can pay back during feature work (safer refactors, fewer regressions), not only during incidents.