There are other ways to attain reliability. Redundancy is one.
There is nothing simple about the way the Internet works but it continues to be proven robust against everything from temporary outage to nation-state revolution.
Exactly. I think Dijkstra was off on this one. Simplicity may be a prerequisite for a software engineer's sanity but there's no natural law that simple is reliable. If anything, nature trends towards highly interconnected, distributed systems with plenty of redundancy - just like the internet.
There is nothing simple about the way the Internet works but it continues to be proven robust against everything from temporary outage to nation-state revolution.