Let me preface that I do not subscribe to the ideology at all, but the concept of bootstrapping a complex system is intellectually worthwhile and often practical in its use-cases. For example, imagine a tech company with a bunch of datacenters that boot from the network, have redundancy etc, but if you somehow turn the macthines off all at once, no one knows if they can reboot safely (say, service discovery cannot find the machine hosting OS images anymore).
As a practical matter, you can flip the author's mental pessimism and look at the optimistic situation where we conquer other planets, in which case thinking about an optimal bootstrapping path is going to be essential for the society and its industrial needs.
It is also true that some fairly local shocks in human society can cause a cascading failure and doing this analysis fairly regularly can help identify and minimize the cascade.
As a practical matter, you can flip the author's mental pessimism and look at the optimistic situation where we conquer other planets, in which case thinking about an optimal bootstrapping path is going to be essential for the society and its industrial needs.
It is also true that some fairly local shocks in human society can cause a cascading failure and doing this analysis fairly regularly can help identify and minimize the cascade.