Don't we have more internet submarine cables and less single points of failure in our internet infrastructure today than years ago? If so, shouldn't that make it easier to route around failures?
Considering that the AWS outage took out a lot of lines of communication (email, video, chat systems) for both commercial and government entities, I'd say that US-East-1 is a pretty big single point of failure. Even if it didn't result in infrastructure impact directly, if there was some kind of infrastructure issue and you had delayed or unavailable communications, how would you know? How quickly could a response be mounted? There's some parts of the infrastructure that could damage themselves irreparably in the time it would take to to fix the outage or get comms routed through a backup channel - like parts of the electrical grid or water treatment plants.
An attacker (read: nation-state actor) wouldn't even need to take down US-East-1, it could just take advantage of the outage.
I assume (hope?) there's some kind of backup comms plan or infra in place for critical events, but I don't actually know.
Maybe yes in that regard. But in the past, most organizations ran their own mail and web servers. Software supporting the business ran on-prem. Now they use Google or Azure or AWS. So business and civilian usage, at least, seem more vulnerable now.
The web though I agree isn't very decentralized.