Loose coupling helps to reduce toil
One way Cloud Native practices reduce toil is through the use of loosely coupled components and microservices architectures. When components in a system are tightly coupled, it is more difficult to change one component without also affecting another.[1] This reduces the overall operability and resilience of the system, and leads to technical debt and unnecessary toil.
A personal example I've seen of this involved complex F5 BIG-IP iRules which tightly coupled business logic into the load-balancing layer. This tight coupling led to incidents, and required special considerations, workarounds, and manual testing during code deployments and OS upgrade cycles.
Remember, one of the key guidelines for a cloud native application is that we can make high impact changes frequently and predictably, with minimal toil.