That minimalist post mortem for the public is of what sounds like a Rube Goldberg machine and the reality is probably even more hairy. I completely agree that if one wants to understand "root causes", it's more important to understand why such machines are built/trusted/evolved in the first place.
That piece by Cook is ok, but largely just a list of assertions (true or not, most do feel intuitive, though). I suppose one should delve into all those references at the end for details? Anyway, this is an ancient topic, and I doubt we have all the answers on those root whys. The MIT course on systems, 6.033, used to assign reading a paper raised on HN only a few times in its history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10082625 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16392223 It's from 1962, over 60 years ago, but that is also probably more illuminating/thought provoking than the post mortem. Personally, I suspect it's probably an instance of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem , but only past a certain scale.
I have a housing activism meetup I have to get to, but real quick let me just say that these kinds of problems are not an abstraction to me in my day job, that I read this piece before I worked where I do and it bounced off me, but then I read it last year and was like "are you me but just smarter?", like my pupils probably dilated theatrically when I read it like I was a character in Requiem for a Dream, and I think most of the points he's making are much subtler and deeper than they seem at a casual read.
You might have to bring personal trauma to this piece to get the full effect.
Oh, it's fine. At your leisure. I didn't mean to go against the assertions themselves, but more just kind of speak to their "unargued" quality and often sketchy presentation. Even that Simon piece has a lot of this in there, where it's sort of "by defenition of 'complexity'/by unelaborated observation".
In engineered systems, there is just a disconnect between on our own/small scale KISS and what happens in large organizations, and then what happens over time. This is the real root cause/why, but I'm not sure it's fixable. Maybe partly addressable, tho'.
One thing that might give you a moment of worry is both in that Simon and far, far more broadly all over academia both long before and ever since, biological systems like our bodies are an archetypal example of "complex". Besides medical failures, life mostly has this one main trick -- make many copies and if they don't all fail before they, too, can copy then a stable-ish pattern emerges.
Stable populations + "litter size/replication factor" largely imply average failure rates. For most species it is horrific. On the David Attenborough specials they'll play the sad music and tell you X% of these offspring never make it to mating age. The alternative is not the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo apocalypse, but the "whatever-that-species-is-biopocalypse". Sorry - it's late and my joke circuits are maybe fritzing. So, both big 'L' and little 'l' life, too, "is on the edge", just structurally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality (with sand piles and whatnot) used to be a kind of statistical physics hope for a theory of everything of these kinds of phenomena, but it just doesn't get deployed. Things will seem "shallowly critical" but not so upon deeper inspection. So, maybe it's not not a useful enough approximation.
Anyway, good luck with your housing meetup!