If we want a truly robust system, yeah, we kinda do. This sort of event is only one of the issues with allowing a single entity to control pretty much everything.

What I’m advocating for is the opposite of “allowing one entity to control everything”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_engineering#Chaos_Monkey

Read about it dude. Netflix has a large presence in all major cloud providers (and they have their own data centers), but has a service whose uptime is NOT dependent on any one of those hosting environments. The proof is the pudding - Netflix service did not go down in the recent AWS outage, nor in the last one.

All of that can be achieved WITHOUT completely abandoning public cloud services and having to completely host all of the hardware for their services.

We don’t have to. It is entirely possible to engineer applications and services in a way that they’re not dependent on any one cloud service, while also using cloud services for IaaS. Netflix famously does this, and sure enough Netflix experience no service interruptions during this latest outage despite having a large AWS presence.