I run a small home lab, about 30 services One day I decided to change my main disk and used the opportunity to rebuild everything from scratch and from backups. I was up in about an hour. And then I spent a week fixing this and that, ah yes I changed that too and, crap, I cannot remember why this thingie is set up this way. And some more. This is a one-man lab, with simple services, all on docker. I also work in IT.…
Modern IT practices don’t really contemplate disaster recovery. Even organisations with strict backup procedures seldom test recovery (most never at all). Everything is quickly strapped together due to teams being understaffed. Preparing infrastructure in a way such that it can easily be recreated is easily twice the effort as “just” setting it up the usual way.
Either that bites you sooner or later, or you're lucky and grow; suddenly, you're a larger organisation, and there are way too many moving parts to start from scratch. So you do a half-hearted attempt of creating a backup strategy held together by duct-tape and hope, that kinda-sorta should work in the worst case, write some LLM-assisted documentation that nobody ever reads, and carry on. You're understaffed and overworked anyway, people are engaging in shadow IT, your actual responsibilities demand attention, so that's the best you can do.
And then you've grown even bigger, you're a reputable company now, and then the consultants and auditors and customers with certification requirements come in. So that's when you actually have to put in the work, and it's going to be a long, gruesome, exhausting, and expensive project. Given, of course, that nobody fucks up in the mean time.