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You sure can. There are many details and caveats and it takes a lot more infrastructure and technical sophistication. Many small sites don't control their own routing at all, for example.

DNS is very simple, easy, and mostly good enough. And DNS failover is now well-enough known that we can mostly expect clients to accept fault if they don't engineer to expect it.

Yes, with BGP and anycast.

What you can't do with the above is more fine grain load balancing. If your LAX node is getting overloaded, you can use a combination of geo and DNS to start splitting some amount of traffic away.

via the magic of Anycast :)