Most people forget that the early web was built in server closets on-site handling hundreds of requests per second. The business was sold hyperscalers because devs wanted more servers and were tired of arguing WHY they wanted more servers. Then they got sold on Highly Available services because every second you're down is a dollar, or more, lost. Nobody mentioned that the cost of building and maintaining it costs more than the money you'd lose except for the largest of organizations.

Don't even get me started on the resume-driven development that came along with it.

And maybe I'm completely wrong. This is a perspective of one.

Honestly I think that the real result of this is developers that don't really understand the underlying tooling and invent all sorts of bad architectures.

One common example I cite is at one job I owned Kafka and RabbitMQ clusters. Zero consideration was given to message size recommendations and we had incidents on the regular because some application was shoving multi-hundred megabyte messages into RMQ. They'd do other stupid shit like not ack their messages which would cause them to never be removed from local disk. This was a huge org, public company, hiring "only the best and brightest".

Management endlessly just threw more hardware at it rather than make the engineers fix their obviously bad architecture. What a headache. Some companies take the "prioritize engineer happiness" thing right off a cliff.