We study the noncollapsed singularity formation of Einstein 4-manifolds. We prove that any smooth Einstein 4-manifold close to a singular one in a mere Gromov-Hausdorff (GH) sense is the result of a gluing-perturbation procedure that we develop. This sheds light on the structure of the moduli space of Einstein 4-manifolds near its boundary and lets us show that spherical and hyperbolic orbifolds (which are synthetic Einstein spaces) cannot be GH-approximated by smooth Einstein metrics. New obstructions specific to the compact situation moreover raise the question of whether or not a sequence of Einstein 4-manifolds degenerating while bubbling out gravitational instantons has to be Kähler-Einstein.