In the narrow distributed-systems sense? Yes, however those requirements are self-imposed. AWS chose strong global consistency for IAM and billing... they could loosen it at enormous expense.
The control plane must know the truth about your account and that truth must be globally consistent. That’s where the trouble starts I guess.
I think my old-school system admin ethos is just different than theirs. It's not a who's wrong or right, just a difference in opinions on how it should be done I guess.
The ISP I work for requires us to design in a way that no single DC will cause a point of failure, just difference in design methods and I have to remember the DC I work in is completely differently used than AWS.
In the end however, I know solutions for this exist (federated ledgers, CRDT-based control planes, regional autonomy but they’re just expensive and they don’t look good on quarterly slides), it just takes the almighty dollar to implement and that goes against big business, if it "works" it works, I guess.
AWS’s model scales to millions of accounts because it hides complexity, sure but the same philosophy that enables that scale prevents true decentralization. That is shit. I guess people can architect as if us-east-1 can disappear so that things can continue on, but then thats AWS causing complexity in your code. They are just shifting who is shouldering that little known issue.