> being oncall forces the quality of software to improve.
Only when it's the managers that are on call.
are they usually not? is there no industry standard concept of an escalation manager?
I believe that too is as the author wrote – like a disheartening number of things in the tech industry, there are no real standards around what on-call responsibilities look like. Each organization is free to set things up in whichever way suits their tastes, and the resulting practices vary widely as a result.