> Splunk/ELK/DataDog/whatever but I have never in my life seen a case where that's a replacement for viewing the logs

Uh, any time I run a distributed system and logs could appear on n nodes I need a log aggregator or I am tailing in n terminals. I almost only use Splunk. I tail logs in dev. Prod needs an aggregator. This has been my experience at 4 of my last 6 companies. The shit companies who had all the issues? Logs on cloudwatch or only on the node