It's especially interesting from a product design standpoint: everyone knows things break sometimes but when it forces you out of an easy path into something much harder or simply locks you into a lengthy penalty time delay, people will remember that one time FAR more vividly than all of the times it worked normally.

This is especially true for things like CloudFormation where the user is likely on a deadline or in a stressful situation trying to fix a problem or hit a deployment window. Forcing someone to wait an unpredictable amount of time for no reason ramps up the stress level massively.