In a recent article from the Amazon Builders' Library, Jacob Gabrielson highlights the importance of avoiding fallbacks in distributed systems. Fallbacks are strategies used to handle critical failures, but they can be challenging to test and may introduce unpredictable load or latent bugs. Instead, Amazon focuses on improving the reliability of non-fallback cases, letting callers handle errors, pushing data proactively, converting fallbacks into failovers, and ensuring retries and timeouts don't become fallbacks. By adopting these strategies, distributed systems can achieve greater resilience and scalability.