Agreed
I survived 2 bottle refusers. By 4 months the feeds had spaced enough to go out for a couple of hours which was enough to do things like regular fitness classes or do errands without bringing them. Prior to that, they were fairly portable for most occasions.
By 10 months they were eating enough solids and drinking water from cups and happy to go through a day of nursery then catch up on feeds when they got home.
At 12m with DS2, I went away for 4 days. The only issue was for me and the breast pump struggling to keep up with the engorgement. When I got home, he latched on straight away and normality resumed.
My worst day of parenting was trying to get DS1 on a bottle for nursery. I struggled to express, and it wasn't something that we needed to do to be worth that effort. It was a desperate day of screaming, trying umpteen bottles/ teets, me getting engorged and after miserable desperate hours, I gave in. I never attempted to put myself & DS2 through that.
What I didn't know then was that DS1 had CMPA and soya intolerance, so formula was basically a poison to his immune system. If BFing hadn't worked, he'd have been a very poorly baby before being prescribed neocate. DS1 also turned out many years later to be autistic with sensory processing issues which explains a reluctance to accept teets and expressed milk of the wrong temperature.
It's tough having a bottle refuser, not the actual getting out and living bit, that's generally quite doable; it's the guilting from pro-BFing sources about ruining supply etc, and the pressure from society that babies neeeeed to take bottles. Whatever you do, you're in the wrong.
It's handy if baby takes a bottle, but it's not compulsory.
And the chances of a healthy mum suddenly struck dead without baby are pretty damn slim. DS1 would have just had to have sucked up being very distressed then made ill by allergenic formulas, before finding an appropriate feeding method.