Yeah this is kind of an abstraction failure of the infrastructure. Ideally the surface visible to the user should be simple across the entire spectrum of use cases. In some very, very rare cases one necessarily has to spelunk under the facade and know something about the internals, but for some reason it seems to happen much more often in the real world. I think people often don't put enough effort into making their system model fit with the native model of the infrastructure, and instead torture the infrastructure interface (often including the "break glass" parts) to fit into their a priori system model.