Of course you don't "need" them. However, I don't believe I'm describing a large scale boilerplate. You can get this with a few servers and a couple hundred a month these days. Heck, you can do it on a laptop w/ minikube probably (though obviously not ok to do in prod, just goes to show the costs are not the problem here). Sure it's easy to run an app. But it's not easy to admin it as you grow (even though you are not yet "big" and still may be only one or two people).