If I'm in a software development role, and the software doesn't work, well the buck stops with me. I may need to shut down a box and spin up a larger one, but ensuring that hardware is adequate is what the developer is for. If I have given an EC2 instance more load than it is ready for, that's on me.

With this mental model, of course it's false praise, just like it would be false praise for me to give credit to my hardware.

Now I don't buy this model. But this is the logical implication of it - success is the flip side of failure.