I have also found this happening. It's actually really funny because I think even I'm less inclined to run postgres myself these days, when I used to run literally hundreds of instances with not much more than PG_DUMP, cron and two read only replicas.

These days probably the best way of getting these 'cloudy' engineers on board is just to tell them its Kubernetes and run all of your servers as K3s.

I’m convinced that cloud companies have been intentionally shaping dev culture. Microservices in particular seem like a pattern designed to push managed cloud lock in. It’s not that you have to have cloud to use them, but it creates a lot of opportunities to reach for managed services like event queues to replace what used to be a simple function call or queue.

Dev culture is totally fad driven and devs are sheep, so this works.