Your post is really weird to me, talking about boarding times? You start skeptical of the example & I'm confused how you think this is anything but a fine example. Ultimately there's some service running in the cloud somewhere that needs to have checks run against it. 2.9m people fly a day in the US, and whether the servers doing that work can do it efficiently or whether they do it in a dogsbit bad manner seems like an obvious concern to me? https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers

I suspect the actual usage for this is for much broader higher traffic systems. For things that watch sizable chunks of the internet for patterns and traffic. But checking passengers against. I fly lists sounds like a pretty reasonable example use to me, and the criticism seems off base & weird in a number of dimensions that straight up don't make sense.