Taking the example of grocery store logistics, the number of times products are unavailable in my local store makes me thing that's a thing that doesn't "just work". It's something that breaks down regularly, and possibly has lots of people working hard to keep it from breaking even more often.

The same is true for lots of things. Stuff like water delivery and silicon manufacturing doesn't break all the time because lots of people are fighting to make it work, and are actively maintaining it all the time.

I think it's possible that most things don't "just work", and we're just fortunate that there are teams of people out there stopping us seeing the effects of all the failures.

For some of these foundations to still be standing and building occupants not to notice anything's wrong ... I can't even imagine how much safety factor is built-in. If we built software with those margins, nothing would ever ship.

Here's a few: https://imgur.com/gallery/Ko2jo4j

https://imgur.com/gallery/fD4jCdc

https://imgur.com/gallery/0JyOXy0

Sometimes they share pictures of foundations completely detached from anything. And it keeps working!

The issue is then not just with the item, but with societies that are increasingly accepting low quality: this is a horrible trend, and one side of decadence. You get both, flanked: low quality here for the occasion and decadence around for the trend.

The idea you say of some "distracted" ones "not realizing the failure potential" has a legitimate justification, beyond the simple inattentive, in those (inexperienced) that assume, for a number of reasons (especially including an internal healthy "mindset" of good standards), things are done properly. There is a line in a script for Scorsese that goes like: «I'm the guy doing my job, you must be the other one».

At workplaces this creates a lot of absurd situations that eat up insane amounts of productivity.

Or another example, it's pretty common that water pipes don't work as expected. (Congestion, low pressure, undesired backflow, tricky to get water at body temperature...) Nobody really complains, everybody lives with it and learns to completely ignore it. I'm not saying these problems occur everywhere 100% of the time but often enough to show there's something structurally not working

Foundations are such, 70s-80s had certain style which now has been found to lead to issues like mold if done even slightly imperfectly.

Or water pipes from certain age that have already in 20-30s have started to leak, these being copper pipes...

After the fall of the Soviet Union, UK experts flew in to help with the transition, and one of the apparatchiks asked: "We are eager to try this capitalism thing; now tell us: who is in charge of the daily delivery of bread to London?"