“You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?” - Steven Wright.

“Better to have hoarding disorder than to need a fifty year old carrier bag full of rotting bus tickets and not have one” really should need more justification than a quote about how convenient it is to have what you need. The reason caches exist as a thing is so you can have what you probably need handy because you can’t have everything handy and have to choose. The amount of things you might possibly want or need one day - including unforeseen needs - is unbounded, and refusing to make a decision is not good engineering, it’s a cop-out.

Apart from cost, the more time and money you spend indexing, cataloging, searching it. How many companies are going to run an internal Google-2002 sized infrastructure just to search their old hoarded data?

I'm not sure what poor engineering practices you have seen, but in my painfully-gotten experience, application of this principle usually amounts to having varying levels of a debug log flag that dump this info either to stdout via JSONL that's piped somewhere, or as attributes in OTEL spans.

This has never been a source of significant issues for me.