I relate to this. I started building side projects last year, and being used to all the bells and whistles of CI/CD, serverless/containers and amazing monitoring and dashboarding tooling, I defaulted to those patterns even for my tiny projects. To make matters worse, I tried building everything on top of free tiers of various services, which made configuration and setup even harder as I was trying to glue things together in non standard ways just to make free stuff look like the stuff I have at my job.
I quickly learned that I needed none of that crap. Now I usually just have one dev environment (my local machine) and one prod, usually a free cloudflare worker. DB is almost always a free tier postgres instance. Testing and prod deployment happens on git precommit and postcommit hooks instead of inside a CI pipeline. No docker is usually necessary as I just build typescript services which have native support on most platforms. DB migrations are run directly from my local machine when I need them to run, instead of having specialized config in a CI pipeline.
I quickly learned that I needed none of that crap. Now I usually just have one dev environment (my local machine) and one prod, usually a free cloudflare worker. DB is almost always a free tier postgres instance. Testing and prod deployment happens on git precommit and postcommit hooks instead of inside a CI pipeline. No docker is usually necessary as I just build typescript services which have native support on most platforms. DB migrations are run directly from my local machine when I need them to run, instead of having specialized config in a CI pipeline.