I find it is the opposite way around. I come up with <simple solution> based on open source tooling and I am forced instead to use <expensive enterprise shite> which is 100% lock in proprietary BS because <large corporate tech company> is partnered and is subsidising development. This has been a near constant throughout my career.

I agree, my statement is too coarse. There can be a lot of organizational pressure to produce complexity and it’s not fair to just blame engineers.

I’ve given a lot of engineers tasks only to find they are “setting up kubernetes cluster so I can setup automated deployments with a dashboard for …”

And similarly in QA I rarely see a cost/benefit consideration for a particular test or automation. Instead it’s we are going to fully automate this and analyze every possible variable.