From my experience, the key point in this story is that if you bother people enough with useless manual interventions, they will come up with a way to automate

From my experience, the key point in this story is that if you bother people enough with useless manual interventions, they will come up with a way to automate themselves out of the job. Furthermore, the solution is often simpler and cheaper than the monitoring infrastructure. And, well, the rest of the anecdote is based on the waste of money caused by the fact that the external company had everything to gain from overengeneering the solution.