You've missed the point. It doesn't matter that you can rebuild the system exactly, the example in question had little to do with how accurate the restores were, it had to do with the time to reinstall.

I too can entirely rebuild many systems simple from kickstarting a new one and applying an ansible playbook. Do I want to? No, that's too slow, and I might be doing this operation for tens or hundreds of systems.

We have multiple levels of backups. We use veeam for VM and physical backups of the entire system to a disk store that's also shipped off-site to an immutable store, but we also run an older system based on rsync which rsyncs the system to directory on a server (sans some data directories) that uses snapshots to keep space usage minimal for the purpose.

In many cases, if we want to restore we can literally just rsync data back to the host, whether one or a few files or most of the system.

I can restore many types of failures within seconds or single digit minutes at most, and the time required is mostly unattended time. Time to restore is often an important and overlooked metric, until you've been bitten by it and realized that an hour or more of work from a person to restore something doesn't scale well in some scenarios, and those are often the most important ones.