I think you have missed the point. I think the point of that section actually has nothing to do with the locations.txt interface between the maps app and locolist. It's actually about the fact that, with microservices, any piece of the system only depends on it's dependency graph, not on every piece of the system working.
"... on a huge service like Netflix the entire application going down because a change was made to one part of it..."
To extend your OS example, just because there was a kernel panic in the Bluetooth stack is no reason to stop servicing requests over the Ethernet NIC which is already bound by the web server. There's also no need to edit or recompile the Ethernet driver because of a Bluetooth problem; see others posts about encapsulation.
"... on a huge service like Netflix the entire application going down because a change was made to one part of it..."
To extend your OS example, just because there was a kernel panic in the Bluetooth stack is no reason to stop servicing requests over the Ethernet NIC which is already bound by the web server. There's also no need to edit or recompile the Ethernet driver because of a Bluetooth problem; see others posts about encapsulation.