I've never seen an incident report or postmortem that didn't include action items to cover the core issue noted in this writing: "can we / how do we prevent this failure mode from recurring?"

I'm not saying these moments of discovery / epiphany aren't valuable, they are and this retelling is enjoyably written.

I am saying that action items borne of incidents should be de rigueur.

Right, this is not even table stakes, it’s the whole point of a post-mortem.

When you have a bug in a program, you fix it. This is just a variation of that incredibly obvious “advice” applied at a slightly different level.