> Most projects don’t need Kafka, or Elastic, or Redis, or GraphQL, etc.

I guess I just don't really see this being a problem outside of social media.

And I think another aspect that gets lost is that 20 years, your options were slim. Which means picking the right tool for the job was easier (because even if it wasn't the right tool, chances are it was as close as you were gonna get).

Things are different right now. Even something as ubiquitous as authentication is vastly different than it was back then. There's way more at play when picking tools nowadays, so it doesn't surprise me when people get it wrong.