Queues Don't Absorb Load — They Delay Bankruptcy

There's a version of this story that every backend engineer has lived through at least once. Traffic spikes, latency climbs, someone suggests a queue, the queue gets added, and for a while — maybe twenty minutes, maybe two hours — everything looks stable again. Dashboards green. On-call engineer breathes. And then, with the particular cruelty of systems that have been quietly filling up while you weren't watching, the whole thing falls apart worse than before. The queue didn't save you. It gave you a longer runway before the same cliff.