And even if your framework is to use customer needs as justification for complexity, people will still use something like Kubernetes for an app with 10 monthly users, because it "helps us deliver features faster, have zero-downtime deployments and be scalable".
Most (non-product) engineers have a natural inclination to introduce more complexity, and will use mental gymnastics to justify it.
With respect, this is clearly a false dichotomy.
Creating the "simplest possible system" that solves customer needs is the entire point of this discussion. Avoiding as much complexity as possible brings enormous benefits. (Less bugs, less employee turnover, higher productivity, etc.)
Never accept the notion that systems must be "difficult-to-work with" in order to solve customer needs.
My point is that there are many, many developers who "relentlessly say no to feature requests that literally destroy the system to add some new feature" when the reality is that they do not want to put in the effort required to add the (meaningful) feature to the system.
They are choosing system purity and laziness over delivering customer value, which requires more work in order to keep things simple.
Just today, for example, I removed several thousand lines of code from a very complex form that no customer ever really used other than for testing. My boss told me "just nuke it". Life goes on.
Would you rather have a simple system that does nothing, or a complex / difficult-to-work with system that solves customer needs? It's easy to go too far in either direction.