I mean, yeah, there is ultimately a judgment call involved. The problem is that many people make judgment calls that are clearly biased toward complexity, with vague non-technical justifications like "This will be useful when we get 10x bigger", "<Last-years-buzzword> is outdated technology", and "This is based on a whitepaper from Google." Unless the project is explicitly intended for experimentation, these are not good justifications!

If you're using something like Docker or Kubernetes, good justifications are like "Docker replaces a bunch of scripts we used to have to use to deploy our compiled binaries over a fleet of servers" and "Kubernetes really helped us measure and manage the shared hosting environment that runs our lightweight services".

How often do you hear these justifications, or others that refer to actual improvements in the technical processes? Usually it's just "containers are really cool d00d" or "We spend way too much on AWS, and since the concept of not using AWS is unfathomable to us, we are collapsing everything down to 8 instances that run Kubernetes and spending tens of thousands of dollars on the engineering overhaul to support that instead of just provisioning cheaper servers."