Comment by flashdesk

I think this is an important distinction. Documentation and automation can preserve artifacts, but not the actual capability.

A runbook can tell you what usually works, but it cannot tell you when the situation is no longer “usual.” That kind of judgment mostly comes from seeing real systems fail in messy ways over time.

Tools are still valuable, of course. But they work best when they help experienced people transfer knowledge, not when they are used as a reason to remove the people who understand the system.