I responded to a post that merely linked to the Wikipedia article for exponential backoff (in response to "I'd be interested to hear other strategies in [protecting against retry storms]")

The submitted article is precisely about the degenerate case and the difficult work of dealing with it

> This approach works for transient or low-rate failures. However, during moderate or severe degradation, it becomes counterproductive. Aggressively retrying against an already struggling service increases load, accelerates failure, and amplifies retry traffic across upstream dependencies. What begins as a localized outage can quickly escalate into a stack-wide incident—ultimately degrading, or in the worst case, completely breaking, the end user experience.