One word: scale. The services you mention above do require scale if commercial. OP argues and I somewhat agree that lots of resume driven tech was oversold and overused making things more complicated and expensive than they should have. Once tech gets more mature it’s harder do misuse and it is used where real needs arise.
This is true, but in my opinion badly misunderstood.
There are a huge number of "commercial" things that are hitting several million dollars a month in revenue running Ruby On Rails or WordPress/PHP. You can scale a long long way with "boring technology".
Way too many people think that are "the unicorn" who's user base is going to grow so quickly that then need billion simultaneous user scale right now - instead of realising that before they get even close to that they'll be generating enough revenue to have an engineering team of hundreds who will have rewritten everything two or three times with more suitable architectures already.
If you need a billion users to turn a profit, then whether you admit it or not your business model is "burn VC money until they stop giving it to us or we pivot using Doctorow's Enshittification blog posts as a guide book". That though, is a vanishingly small percentage of all dev work. Most business models have a way too make real profits of thousands or perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands of transactions a month - and they should be rolling in profit to reinvest in future higher scale development well before they run out of fairly pedestrian "boring technology" platforms. Horizontally scalable Java/PHP/Ruby/Node with vertically scaling databases on you cloud provider of choice is a well known and battle tested way to generate real value and cashflow in probably 99% of all businesses.
I absolutely agree. But keep in mind that a lot of these services are made by startups that want to be acquired by someone with big pockets. Using hyped tech helps the sale. Don’t ask me why…
