"And that's what happened with Air France flight 447. Although Bonin had accumulated thousands of hours in an Airbus cockpit, his actual experience of flying an A330 by hand was minimal. His role as a pilot had mostly been to monitor the automatic system. It meant that when the autopilot disengaged during that evening's flight, Bonin didn't know how to fly the plane safely."
About planes, but from the Cars chapter. And this is kind of how I feel about on-call and runbooks. Runbooks, automation and safety systems (I.e. tooling that tries to stop you doing stupid things) are important, but you do also just need some skin in the game and some understanding of the fundamentals of the systems you are supporting. Runbooks aren’t the be-all and end-all.