I think this is 100% true. I've never used the term overkill personally.

If I don't know something, I simply say I don't know. And if I do, I always position the trade off of the choice relatively and weigh it.

Thing is, it really changes the equation of whether it's worth or not.

If you or some other senior engineer knows X, then perhaps they can implement X in an hour and things remain simple.

If your team does not know X, then it will take a week to learn X, understand it, try it out on a toy project and implement it in production (which alone might make it an overkill, because it's not worth a week) and it becomes quite plausible that we'll implement it wrong in a way that will bite us later.

So unless the benefit is huge, then it's quite reasonable to say "x is overkill" for your team simply because you don't know X.

The GP of my comment says:

> Me as a manager at a startup: "Do not install Terraform. Finish the import prototype... now."

The team knows Terraform. The manager probably does not. I was responding to that.

Well introducing some new technology that people will have to learn is often overkill, if there is already a slightly less optimal way to do it that the whole team is familiar with.

Do you know k8s?

Haha perhaps not well enough, thus proving my earlier point :-)