It’s hard to hire people to do anything else. People don’t know how to admin machines so forget bare metal even though it can be thousands of times cheaper for some work loads (especially bandwidth).
You’re not exaggerating with a raspberry pi. Not at all.
The "entire generation of developers" paradigm is all over in different domains too--web programmers that seem to honestly think web development is only React/Angular and seem to have no idea that you can just write JS, python programmers that have no idea a large portion of the "performant codebases" are piles of native dependencies etc
Same goes for users. There are about the same number of computer literate users as there were back then. There’s just a new class of iPad/iPhone user who is only a casual user of computers and the net and barely knows what a file is.
Don't forget various pipelines, IaC, pipelines for deploying IaC, test/dev/staging/whatever environments, organization permissions strategies etc etc...
When I worked at a large, uh, cloud company as a consultant, solutions were often tailored towards "best practices"--this meant, in reality, large complex serverless/containerized things with all sorts of integrations for monitoring, logging, NoSQL, queues etc, often for dinky little things that an RPI running RoR or NodeJS could serve without breaking a sweat.
With rare exceptions, we'd never be able to say, deploy a simple go server on a VM with server-side rendered templates behind a load balancer with some auto-scaling and a managed database. Far too pedestrian.
Sure, it's "best practices" for "high-availability" but was almost always overkill and a nightmare to troubleshoot.