Even when working in small companies with small infrastructure, I've kept recreation of infrastructure as one of my high priorities (one reason it really bugged me in one job to have to depend on Oracle Databases that I couldn't automate to the same degree.)
In my mind, it's not different from the importance of having, and testing restoration of, backups. If your infrastructure gets compromised somehow, or you find yourself up the creek with your provider, you've got to be able to rebuild everything from scratch.
Then you realize a lot of software and databases can only run from a single instance, zero support for multi regions, and you're not gonna to rewrite everything and resiliency just can't happen.