Uber has ~ 34,000 corporate employees. What sorts of inferences do you want to make from an engineering blog post with the names of 4 employees?

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There are only 2 people on the list with the same surname, and Srivastava is a very common surname.

Not quite. A token. bucket alone would not prevent a retry storm if you have a chain of services A -> B -> C -> D with a failure in D, you'd end up still having A, B & C all performing retries as they cascade through the chain, albeit (yes) at your configured rate-limits (using token bucket), but you'd still end up with an amplification effect.