It is almost fifty years since Dijkstra coined the term "self-stabilization" to denote a distributed system able to recover correct behavior starting from any arbitrary (even unreachable) configuration. His seminal paper triggered many works since then, exploring over the years new variants of the original concept, new application domains, and new complexity results. While the huge majority of those contributions relates to theory, considering computability and worst case complexity issues, this talk revisits old and recent contributions from the prism of ``realistic'' distributed systems, aiming to address the following question: is self-stabilization relevant in practice for distributed systems?