I think you missed the point here. It's not that causality doesn't exist, or you shouldn't use the 5-whys, it's that we have a desire to focus on single causes

I think you missed the point here. It's not that causality doesn't exist, or you shouldn't use the 5-whys, it's that we have a desire to focus on single causes instead of multiple ones, and understand systems and simple cases of cause-and-effect. Systems are coded and tested for common paths. Extremely rare circumstances take systems down pathways engineers may have not planned for. When you layer systems, combinations of rare situations can cause "storms" that take everything down. There was a great article on AWS on HN a few months ago that made a point that bears repeating: they are doing something with PaaS at that scale that is quantitatively different than what's been done before. But nobody is saying to give up causal analysis, only to recognize the limits of RCA when your causation tree can span into hundreds of nodes. The interesting thing here is that the human application of the analysis tool has it's own features that's just becoming apparent. Analysis tools have human environments they live in. Once you acknowledge that a a separate issue, there's no reason you can't continue to use those tools (and others) to work through the problems.