In my experience, code is a small fraction of the work.

I'm in an infra team and for the last 2 weeks or so I've been trying to understand whether a particular workload will catch fire if a switch is flicked. I'm also new to the team so partly it is me wearing training wheels, familiarizing myself with the telemetry etc, but I will state that I'm not completely lousy at this stuff.

No model in my experience can do anything remotely comparable to the work "what happens to the workload if this switch is flicked" needs. They can't even design a reliable quick experiment to answer what cast should be applied to the binary trace_id in table A for the join to table B to work. They will happily do something idiotic and then conclude that the join does not work.