This is a major problem with our industry. Unfortunately, the people with the power to curb this trend have their paycheck depend on it continuing.

As a company, you are incentivised to have a large tech team to appear credible and raise funding, so you hire a CTO and maybe some engineering managers. Their career in turn benefits from managing large amounts of people and solving complex technical problems (even if self-inflicted), so they’ll hire 10x the amount of engineers the task at hands truly requires, organise them in separate teams and build an engineering playground that guarantees their employment and gives them talking points (for conferences or the seemingly-mandatory engineering blog or in interviews for their next role) about how they solve complex problems (self-inflicted, as a side-effect of an extremely complex stack with lots of moving parts). Developers themselves need to constantly keep up to date, so they won’t usually push back on having to use the latest frontend framework, and even if they do, that decision is out of their hands and they’ll just get replaced or not hired to begin with.

In the end, AWS and the cloud providers are laughing all the way to the bank to collect their (already generous) profits, now even more inflated by having their clients use 10x the amount of compute power that the business problem would normally require.

Maybe the issue is the seemingly-infinite amounts of money being invested into tech companies of dubious value, and the solution would be to get back to Earth as to have some financial pressure coming from up top that incentivises using the simplest solution to the problem at hand?