It's resume-driven development. It honestly can make sense for both company and employee.

Companies get standard tech stacks people are happy to work with, because working with them gets people experience with tech stacks that are standard at many companies. It's a virtuous cycle.

And sure even if you need just a specific thing, it's often better to go slightly overkill for something that's got millions of stack overflow solutions for common issues figured out. Vs picking some niche thing that you are now 1 of like six total people in the entire world using in prod.

Obviously the dose makes the poison and don't use kafka for your small internal app thing and don't use k8s where docker will do, but also, probably use k8s if you need more than docker instead of using some weird other thing nobody will know about.

That's what happened where I worked. The people making the tech decisions were worried they weren't "keeping up" and committed us all-in on kafka. That decision cost the company millions.