> If I were a CTO trying to save money

A CTOs job isn't to save money but to spend money effectively. Saving money by increasing risk is not neccesarily a prudent move.

On prudent choices: one thing I'm surprised about is that LLMs are showing me libraries and tools that I'd not found via search.

A boring one from today was about select, datalist or some custome element (which LLM can prototype) or some JS libs. Good breakdown; links to playgrounds, rough mocks so team could kick tires. It raises points the team had and had counterpoint to help drive decisions.