I totally agree with you, I think retries are overused, with the exception of operations that are known to be unreliable and can't be improved.
In my experience, errors which go away within a few seconds are quite rare, and are mainly due to flaws which are usually caught in testing.
I think a very careful cost/risk/benefit analysis should be done when adding automatic retries to things. As well as potentially causing cascading failures, it is a degraded user experience when it doesn't succeed.
As a user I would rather see an error straight away than see many seconds of spinning while something silently retries, and THEN an error.
In my experience, errors which go away within a few seconds are quite rare, and are mainly due to flaws which are usually caught in testing.
I think a very careful cost/risk/benefit analysis should be done when adding automatic retries to things. As well as potentially causing cascading failures, it is a degraded user experience when it doesn't succeed.
As a user I would rather see an error straight away than see many seconds of spinning while something silently retries, and THEN an error.