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Some tools are more fragile and error prone than others.

Except that this wasn't an example of BGP being prone to error or fragile. This was, as the blog post specifically calls out, human error. They put two BGP announcement rules after the "deny everything not previously allowed" rule. It's the same as if someone did this to a set of ACLs on a firewall.

The main difference between BGP and all other tools is that if you mess up BGP, you've done a very visible thing because BGP underpins how we get to each other's networks. But it's not a sign of BGP being fragile, just very important.

That does seem like bad UX/"DevX" that that configuration of rules is "valid" syntactically and there weren't better equivalents of "linters"/"compilers" flagging that before it ever got sent out as an announcement. UX issues are a "proneness" to error/fragility. It sounds like there is room to build a "higher level language" (like a "Typescript : Javascript :: ? : BGP") for BGP announcements that is less prone to "accidentally bad programs". Not that I have immediate suggestions, just that my gut reaction from skimming these sorts of outage reports is that if it was a "language" I was writing in I can hear that I'd want a lot more (type) safety nets.

Some tools are more prone to human error than others.

Another canonical example is C++. Some tools make it easy to blow your leg off. Some tools provide safety mechanisms to stop the saw from cutting off your finger.

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