Funny thing is, those are the exact words I use when talking to people about networking. And realistically anytime I dig deep into the underlying details of any big enough system I walk away with that impression. At scale, I think any system is less “controlled and planned precision” and more “harnessed chaos with a lot of resiliency to the unpredictability of that chaos”
Components aren’t reliable. The whole thing might be duct tape and popsicle sticks. But the trick for SRE work is to create stability from unreliable components by isolating and routing around failures.
It’s part of what made chaos engineering so effective. From randomly slowing down disk/network speed to unplugging server racks to making entire datacenters go dark - you intentionally introduce all sorts of crazy failure modes to intentionally break things and make sure the system remains metastable.
The syncronasation of a power grid ... Wow.
Or the U.S. financial system. Or civilization in general.
Most operating systems are based on ambient authority, which is just a disaster waiting to happen.