I work in a fairly mature startup that’s been around for over 10 years. It began primarily with an app, but shifted focus to other business areas. The image processing products are mostly related to offering information retrieval and search services for app users that have curated personal image collections.

I would say your description is accurate but only accidentally. The reason we have to learn more core engineering skills is that infrastructure will not take responsibility of bringing our solutions to production, and seek to limit the tools in our toolbox with policy.

It’s not fun when your everyday life is constant impedance mismatch against tools that infra will allow you to use. You can constantly see better / faster / safer / cheaper ways to solve problems, which have no downsides at all relative to the bad, slow, insecure, expensive ways infra currently makes everyone solve problems, but you just feel constantly sad that you are superficially prevented from the autonomy to select the efficient solution accordung to your creativity and skill.