This post would have been stronger if the author had gone back to their original 5 whys and continued it without counterfactuals.

- Build didn't happen, why?

- Pod didn't start, why?

- Disk was full, why?

At this point if counterfactuals are off the table, the answers become tautologies. Although if everyone is in agreement that counterfactuals are not helpful, this could become a powerful heuristic in determining that you've hit root cause and can shift from searching for root cause to designing mitigations for the root cause.

I guess that's the point of the post, but it seemed weird to start a scenario saying "it goes off the rails here, because of XYZ" and not come back and give the better version of that scenario.