I’m aware, but my point was simply that people are prone to overstating the extent of those problems. If it was as bad as lore would have it, it’d be far less popular.

Why would you think it would be less popular? Most everyone that chooses us-east-1 chooses it because they're close to it and 1 is the first number. They don't research it before they start using it.

If people were experiencing significant downtime they’d leave us-east-1 or AWS. There’s no sign of that happening so I’d suggest that there’s a tendency to over-weight the degree to which people complaining in forums constitutes representative data.

The discussion started as us-east-1 being less reliable than other regions and has strayed far from that into guessing about human behaviour.

"Well known"

That's not sufficient evidence