Replaceable cogs, yes, that's been the push regarding programmers since the 80s? Earlier? Plenty of articles and rants online to read about the phenomenon as it specifically relates to programming going back to the 90s, also probably earlier, too.

The reason you have to pay for a cloud of virtual chickens, is because you can’t get decent bandwidth on a few free range beef & dairy cattle.

A single well tended rack in a closet on-site, with a few single cpu servers hosting multiple applications, a SAN, and a fat data pipe could replace hundreds of Kubernetes clusters — if there wasn’t a cartel on network speed.