Every human life is directly or indirectly impacted by software. Software controls transport, food and energy production, and all human communication. If all software suddenly stopped working, society would collapse instantly and hundreds of millions of people would die within a year.
The attitude "it's just computers, nothing truly important like medicine" might have been viable 40 years ago, but it certainly isn't anymore.
It's not like you make a bad git commit and suddenly the world stops working. There are checks and processes and redundancies that reduce the impact of human error dramatically.
The earth is still spinning, despite so many things not working everywhere. That's not just in software. In every system, there's relatively few single points of failure. As you zoom out, failure points disappear and new ones appear.
Sure, still sometimes someone notices a critical security flaw that's been in there for a while, and that had found its way into large parts of the infrastructure already. (The last one I heard of was not a memory vulnerability).
Sure, I know this. I don't think this contradicts my argument. It didn't suddenly make running infrastructure exposed. But yeah, people needed to find a replacement to continue development (which I hope wasn't hard)?
If this breakage is an argument for anything, it is against depending on lots of code that you don't even know. The last Rust projects I tried to build all had on the order of 500 transitive dependencies, by the way.
