In the internally famous Google video, Broccoli Man was the jaded production-savvy SWE/SRE who told the earnest SWE (Panda Woman, I think?) what hoops she needs to jump through to launch her service. Among the most famous lines: her "I just want to serve 5TB of data" to his "I forgot how to count that low".
The video had a huge impact because it was funny and had more than a little bit of truth to it. Lots of Google infrastructure was oriented toward huge problems and required the same heavyweight processes for things that aren't so huge. It inspired a bunch of changes to simplify deploying small (by Google standards) services. Many small things are still difficult at Google, but a bit less so now.
I've only said and heard "I forgot how to count that low" as a reference to this video, making fun of the unexpected difficulty of doing something small rather than actually making fun of someone for wanting to do something small.
The video was also described briefly here: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/04/06/5tb/
But yeah, that video was epic, and it was spot-on, too. A company that has no idea how to deal with people is going to suck at making tools _for_ people.
So maybe 'broccoli' is their way of saying craziness? Like being on Google drugs. But obviously that's not a perfect fit. Maybe its a misspelling of something else?
The doesn't mean it's the best — at home I use something different — but for your average business environment it's the safest choice.
I've also done everything from bare servers to VMs to containers, in varying capacities. For small teams with fewer than millions of users, the fewer moving parts the better. One monolithic app scaled mostly vertically, one database scaled mostly vertically, and maybe one caching layer scaled horizontally, will be far more productive for development.
So to clarify: You're asking some sort of an interview question that is to some degree subjective, and then penalizing people when they have an "incorrect" opinion?
A better approach would be to discuss why they have that opinion and why they would go that route over another one.
I discuss my opinion a bit more in depth upthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28990879 but we don't actually know what happened, so it's impossible to say.
The candidate that is unable to explain any details about how linux containers actually work, other than to say "I used kubernetes at my last job" is getting picked after the person that actually understands how they work (given that we're hiring for a low-level linux role in this hypothetical :) ).
Or to frame it in a different way, how would you sort an array of numbers? The answer "I'd call array.sort()" isn't wrong per se, but there's an answer the interviewer is looking for and that's not it. If the interviewee furthermore becomes rude and aggressive about it and doesn't even know what time complexity is, that's a pass. (Not remotely suggesting that that's what happened here, but sometimes the biggest interview isn't official - if you're a raging asshole to the person at the reception desk, don't expect to get a callback.)
If, during an interview, someone couldn't move past "well, I'd just use kubernetes" or give other possible solutions then I could see myself questioning how appropriate they are for a role and consider other candidates.