That’s an entirely different type of problem, and avoidable by just using us-east-2 (I still don’t understand why people default to us-east-1 unless they require some highly specific services).

Is it that easily avoidable? A lot of AWS's control plane seems to have dependencies on us-east-1, or at least that's what it's looked like as a non-us-east-1 user during recent outages.

Sympathy. Railway is going to have numerous people blaming them for this outage. When us-east-1 fails, it is headline news, so you are not to blame.