Even cash breaks down pretty quickly in a hypothetical situation where you have something similar occur that lasts for an extended period. When banks’ systems are impacted, how do I get more cash from my account with them when whatever amount I had when the system went down runs out? I haven’t had a physical passbook for an account in a good 20 years.
I don’t really care about the best class or build, but with my current levels of free time, I at least want to avoid wasting time sinking effort and time I don’t have into a non-viable character, or even a suboptimal one that just makes the game way harder. If I get 20-30 hours into a game and find out that the character/build that most appealed to me is either super hard to play through the game, or basically requires a huge time commitment to get to the point where it suddenly gets good, I’d probably just drop it.