Another interesting angle about the single real server is the reliability.. it'll eventually break from some physical cause, that happens, it hurts your uptime.

But sometimes with the big microservice/kubernetes solution, the configuration space is so big that miscommunications/mistakes could potentially take you down for more hours/year than the downsides of being single-hosted would. So now you invested all of that effort and for what?

One company I worked for wrote a distributed scheduled jobs system that was immune to single-machine failures, it went down like 4 times in a year, messing up my team each time. I was like "guys, if we just provisioned one machine with cron and no failover, it would have better reliability".