A parable communicates a lesson, and the lesson "don't let ops people who have never run an architecture resembling yours near your machines" is kind of vacuous/trivial. Like I said, I'm looking for a piece of wisdom can be extracted from this story that's relevant for modern devops people.

I think the lesson is basically: some systems evolved around doing discrete batch-processing tasks that throw away their arenas when they're done, and have very few and discrete connection points; while other systems are "about" living object graphs that can't be disentangled, only upgraded as an entire system, and which maintain themselves rather than having maintenance done upon them from outside.

Rebooting solves problems with the former, since you're cleaning up all your temp files, cached intermediary results, etc. and then scheduling fresh new tasks. Rebooting the latter just makes it struggle to put itself back together exactly the way it was before. Think of power-cycling an LAMP "app-tier" server (Unixine) vs. a database server (Vaxine.)