It's an old joke from back when IBM was the dominant player in IT infrastructure. The idea was that IBM was such a known quantity that even non-technical executives knew what it was and knew that other companies also used IBM equipment. If you decide to buy from a lesser known vendor and something breaks, you might be blamed for going off the beaten track and fired (regardless of where the fault actually lay), whereas if you bought IBM gear and it broke, it was simply considered the cost of doing business, so buying IBM became a CYA tactic for sysadmins even if it went against their better technical judgement. AWS is the modern IBM.

Such a monstrous clusterfuck, and you'll be hard pressed to find anyone having been sacked, let alone facing actual charges over the whole debacle.

If anything, I'd say that's the single best case for buying IBM - if you're incompetent and/or corrupt, just go with them and even if shit hits the fan, you'll be OK.