I think the author is trying to apply a preconceived cause on to the cloudflare outage, but there’s not a fit.
E.g., they should try to work through how their own suggested fix would actually ensure the problem couldn’t happen. I don’t believe it would… lack of nullable fields and normalization typically simplify relational logic, but hardly prevent logical errors. Formal verification can prove your code satisfies a certain formal specification, but doesn’t prove your specification solves your business problem (or makes sense at all, in fact).
E.g., they should try to work through how their own suggested fix would actually ensure the problem couldn’t happen. I don’t believe it would… lack of nullable fields and normalization typically simplify relational logic, but hardly prevent logical errors. Formal verification can prove your code satisfies a certain formal specification, but doesn’t prove your specification solves your business problem (or makes sense at all, in fact).