There are some services that do have hard US-EAST-1 dependencies. Cloudfront, because of certificates. Route53. The control API for IAM (adding/removing roles, etc). And there's also the notion of "global endpoints" like
https://sts.amazonaws.com... it's not clear why that exists, because it fails when us-east-1 does. It would be better to only have regional endpoints if the "global" ones are region-specific in reality. The endpoint thing is documented, but it's still confusing to people.
The dependency chains can bite you too. During the us-east-1 outage, a Lambda run by cron-like schedules via EventBridge was itself in an okay state, but the EventBridge events that kick it off were stuck in a queue that was released when the problem was fixed. So if your Lambda wasn't idempotent, and you ran it in another region during the outage, you ended up with problems.