The problem for a lot of people is that on a small scale physical hosts can appear to be extremely stable.
With a few dozen servers total, I have servers at work that have not had a failure in 8+ years, and we have some hardware that is 12+ years, and until office and data centre moves recently we had hardware that had not been rebooted for 5 years.
We have moved everything to VMs that we take hourly copies of, and can redeploy most of our VMs in minutes because we do know we need to be prepared for hardware failures, and occasionally face them, but they are rare events at our scale.
For people with even smaller setups, with only a handful of servers, they cane easily have periods of years without any failures. Then it's easy for people to get complacent.
With a few dozen servers total, I have servers at work that have not had a failure in 8+ years, and we have some hardware that is 12+ years, and until office and data centre moves recently we had hardware that had not been rebooted for 5 years.
We have moved everything to VMs that we take hourly copies of, and can redeploy most of our VMs in minutes because we do know we need to be prepared for hardware failures, and occasionally face them, but they are rare events at our scale.
For people with even smaller setups, with only a handful of servers, they cane easily have periods of years without any failures. Then it's easy for people to get complacent.