I have never worked for such an agency, but I actually find value in setting up some of the infrastructure from scratch, at least on the application side. It’s a time to dig into the latest versions of each component, or apply learning you wish you could have on other projects but things got too big to make large architectural changes. It costs a few days, but you’re laying down what should be the forever foundation, that’s worth fully understanding and trusting IMO.
All that being said, rolling AWS infrastructure ad-hoc like this is a terrible experience, but I far less experienced with it. Terraform seems like a great general tool to ease the pain, or something with this project.
The project generator became a core part of our business (and a sales argument, actually), so it was maintained to be up-to-date. It's the implementation of what we collectively knew to be best practices: you don't always have time or knowledge to set up each individual component of a project.
If there's a later version of a component or you want to apply learning... contribute back to the project generator, to ensure other projects benefit from it
The only value we lost was the experience a dev gets setting up the infra from scratch. It is a consequent loss, but we deemed it very worth it (and retrospectively, I think it was)
That exploratory work is still done... its just done one time by someone who is "best" suited to do it. Then you just stamp out projects leveraging that exploratory work.
My point is more that the exploratory work is done at one point in time, not that it hasn't been done at all. If it has been years it's likely components you are familiar with have either matured or died, and starting a new project is a great opportunity to catch back up with the current ecosystem.
All that being said, rolling AWS infrastructure ad-hoc like this is a terrible experience, but I far less experienced with it. Terraform seems like a great general tool to ease the pain, or something with this project.