To your point they also, like, wrote their own PHP interpreter. If you asked your Facebook interviewer about PHP you'd probably get an interesting answer!
I think the example of video games and movies is instructive - there's always a ton of "cut content". In software, we can always change the requirements to meet a deadline :)
No, the mysteries that "are deep, hard to understand, and not worth the effort" are why Scientific American is publishing this junk article. My lay theory is that SA hasn't been worth reading in decades and basically nobody can write well about quantum mechanics for a casual audience..
The skill-based matchmaking that's popular today is optimized for setting up a fair game, ie. theres a roughly 50/50 chance of either side winning. It makes logical sense, but it turns out nobody actually wants a fair match!
Rather the opposite - us-west-2 is big but not the biggest region, or the smallest, or the oldest or newest, it's not partitioned off like the China or GovCloud regions. Because us-west-2 is fairly typical it tends to be one of the last regions to get software updates, after they've been tested in prod elsewhere