It's a different approach to managing risk -- minimizing impact of failure rather than minimizing the likelihood of failure.
It's nice to know that you can kill a process and the only impact is that in-flight requests fail, rather than having a more significant outage if a process crashes and the failover doesn't work, or the process doesn't automatically restart, etc.
If you accept that requests will fail you can build retries into the system. It's a lot harder to make a system more resilient if you avoid testing the failure scenarios.
