For us, it's mostly a matter of historical convention. Our entire stack currently lives in -1 (we've had instances there for ~5 years now), and to move to a different region under these pretenses is a bit of a pain in the ass for us considering how transient the impact of these things has typically been to our business.

If we move anywhere, its going to be completely out of AWS and into on-prem or some bare metal provider. Hopping regions hoping to win at some reliability metric game is not a good way to run a business IMO.

us-east-2 has had a 2-3 hour issue with their internet routes which affected all of us-east-2. 2019 so far us-east-2 has been fine for me. My colo has had only 3 5minute outages this year. Keeping the cloud up is tough if even AWS can have large outages still.

they are just less impactful since it's not used as much... see 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19820302

Because the outages there don’t make the HN frontpage.