My point is that on-call is OK if the people that are on-call are empowered to either fully prevent, or permanently fix, conditions that lead to on-call events.

My point is that on-call is OK if the people that are on-call are empowered to either fully prevent, or permanently fix, conditions that lead to on-call events. I'm talking about software development and infrastructure design, which I thought is the topic here. I've done this for many years. The worst case scenario is that the people that are getting woken up at night don't have any control over the root causes of the wake-ups. If you own and created the environment, and it wakes you up at night, that's one thing. If you're just on-call and responsible for other people's messes, that sucks. Hopefully that's more clear!