Most do not, but they still want all the toys that developers are building for “the cloud”.

I believe there's still a lot of potential for building niche / "human-scale" services/businesses, that don't inherently require the scalability of the cloud or complexity of k8s. Scaling vertically is always easier, modern server hardware has insane perf ceiling. The overall reduction in complexity is a breath of fresh air.

My occasional moral dilemma is idle power usage of overprovisioned resources, but we've found some interesting things to throw at idle hardware to ease our conscience about it.

I particularly like this moniker for such human-scale, "digital gardening"-type software: https://hobbit.software/

I think it's two types of defensiveness.

1. Shovel salesman insisting all "real" gold miners use their shovels

2. Those that have already acquired shovels not wanting their purchase to be mocked/have been made in vain.

Neither are grounded in reality. Why people believe their tiny applications require the same tech that Google invented to help manage their (massive) scale is beyond me.