I should perhaps have clarified, but the 10-15 are not self maintained services. You need nginx for routing and ingress, set up cert-manager and other ingress endpoints are automatically configured to have TLS, deploy prometheus, which comes with node-exporter and alert-manager, deploy grafana.

So far, we're up at 6 services, yet still at almost zero developer overhead cost. Then add the SaaS stack for each environment (api, worker, redis) and you're up at 15.

those are basically all things that can be outsourced and not for much money (cloudflare etc)

Sometimes it's faster to implement certain features in another languages and deploy it as microservice instead of fighting your primary language/framework to do it. Deploying microservices in k8s is as easy as writing a single yaml file.

Makes sense, though 15 different languages?

I am not privy to the details of the case, but a rule-of-thumb I heard once is that if it's far enough from your core, a SaaS can be used (obviating the whole question), and if it's part of the core, start by developing it as a separate functionality before moving it to another service.

In a lot of cases it's pattern abuse. I'm dealing with this all the time. People like to split things that can work perfectly as one whole, just for the sake of splitting it.