Its literally essential to have solid tech these days. I don't understand how businesses think they can operate while skimping or even skipping a halfway decently funded IT dept

It's not even close to essential, since by far the majority of businesses are running without anything close to what people on HN would consider adequate. It only becomes a problem if too many of your competitors have good tech and even then only if your industry depends on (software) tech. Companies like bakeries and building contractors can run fine with shitty IT and even if their competitors do IT better, no customer is going to drive further to get a bread from someone who has proper backups instead of from the closest shop.

Sysadmins are expensive. >$100k/yr (in the US, at least) for a full time sysadmin when your other employees are taking $40-60k/yr is a pretty huge expense. If you're not a technology company, there's a good chance you'll look to just outsource it anyway (how are you even going to vet/hire someone in IT when you have no IT department already)

> I don't understand how businesses think they can operate while skimping or even skipping a halfway decently funded IT dept

If a business does not have someone knowledge about IT, how can they know that they have 'deficiencies' with regards to IT?

Things are the way they are and they think that's 'normal' because they don't know any better.

Big business: We can look at our SIEM and endpoint management dashboards and determine that our end user machines are reaching end of useful life due to resource consumption and failure frequency

Small business: Please IT help my 5 year old laptop can't keep up and I swear it's not a virus. Yes, I updated everything

It's amazing watching friends/family outside of tech work. Within 2 minutes of watching someone's machine slow to a crawl, I open Task Manager on Windows and see they're out of RAM and their machine is heavily paging: Yeah, if you had another $40 8GB stick of RAM your machine would be significantly more responsive.