And that's even with things operating to some semblance of regularity and conformance to some established baseline.

Not even covering the "kick it down the road" issues that sometimes (and sometimes don't) evolve into "features that aren't bugs" that have workarounds on workarounds on workarounds that will eventually have their own bugs. The stuff we know we shouldn't do / that isn't good, but that happens anyway.

I subscribe to the philosophy that computers cannot be held accountable, because they're only operating as intended, or at least as implemented. CentOS used to bill itself as a "bug for bug" compatible RHEL clone. I have always thought that to be a good perspective.

Humans are ultimately responsible for the results of computing. In my life that means I review the reports output by my ERP and sanity check numbers before I sign tax returns or remit quarterly tax payments. I trust that the numbers going in are correct, and I trust that (as was said up-thread) statistically my ERP is reliable, but at the end of the day someone has to be accountable for how the output is used.