Remove meticulous. I'm watching 15 year old equipment fail on a daily and the solution is to keep running it. Failing to plan is planning to fail no matter what mental gymnastics you pay a consulting firm to do for you after your layoff 10% of your open office mouth breathers and 50% of your neck down workers.

Businesses seem to have really gotten caught buying their own bullshit. If the numbers are so good and your OEE is so good, you don't need that labor overhead. So they reduce the headcount. Problem is the numbers are all made up and someone whose ass was in the fire is now maybe safe for another few months. Multiply that by a few other "engineers" or whatever intern they pawned serious work off onto and you get a lemon.

I've been doing this a very long time and I've seen business struggle for all sorts of reasons. No one's trying to steer the cart away from the cliff anymore. Why admit fault and get laid off when you can bullshit and get laid off? That's worst case. Bullshit and keep your job? Gravy.

Look at crowdstrike. A tiny error disabled millions of computers for hours. Think about what would have happened, if this wouldn't have been an error, but an actual attack.

Look at the supply chains of medical supplies. One major outbreak of some bacterial disease in India or China will lead to them stopping exports and since so many pills are produced there, a huge drop in global supply.

Look at the undersea cables. There are not that many and capable malicious actor could easily destroy a lot of them.

Look at the power grid. I don't know about other parts of the world, but the European grid, spanning pretty much all countries in Europe plus turkey, has no plan for a cold start. If it breaks down, there's gonna be blackouts for weeks.

Of course, none of that will end society, but that's not how collapses work anyway. One event triggers another, and the combination leads to the collapse itself.