> If the process crashes or your harddisk dies, you want redundancy so even those twelve customers can still access the application.

That's fine, 6 of them are test accounts :-)

> It's sure a corny stance to hold if you're navigating an infrastructure nightmare daily, but in my opinion, much of the complexity addresses not technical, but organisational issues

If you have an entire organisation dedicated to 6 users, those users had better be ultra profitable.

> If the process crashes or your harddisk dies, you want redundancy so even those twelve customers can still access the application

Can be done simply by a sole company owner; no need for tools that make sense in an organisation (K8s, etc)

> You want a CI pipeline, so the junior developer can't just break prod because they forgot to run the tests before pushing.

A deployment script that includes test runners is fine for focused product. You can even do it using a green/blue strategy if you can afford the extra $5-$10/m for an extra VPS.

> You want proper secret management, so the database credentials aren't just accessible to everyone.

Sure, but you don't need to deploy a full-on secrets-manager product for this.

> You want a caching layer, so you're not surprised by a rogue SQL query that takes way too long, or a surge of users that exhaust the database connections because you never bothered to add proper pooling.

Meh. The caching layer is not to protect you against rogue SQL queries taking too long; that's not what a cache is for, after all. As for proper pooling, what's wrong with using the pool that came with your tech stack? Do you really need to spend time setting up a different product for pooling?

> dding guardrails to protect your team from itself mandates some complexity, but just hand-waving that away as unnecessary is a bad answer.

I agree with that; the key is knowing when those things are needed, and TBH unless you're doing a B2C product, or have an extremely large B2B client, those things are unnecessary.

Whatever happened to "profile, then optimise"?