> weve basically been brainwashed to think we need kubernetes and 3 different databases just to serve a few thousand users. gotta burn those startup cloud credits somehow i guess.

I don't think it makes any sense to presume everyone around you is brainwashed and you are the only soul cursed with reasoning powers. Might it be possible that "we" are actually able to analyse tradeoffs and understand the value of, say, have complete control over deployments with out of the box support for things like deployment history, observability, rollback control, and infrastructure as code?

Or is it brainwashing?

Let's put your claim to the test. If you believe only brainwashed people could see value in things like SQLite or Kubernetes, what do you believe are reasonable choices for production environments?

i think you missed the "on day 1" part of my comment. k8s, iac, and observability are incrdible tools when you actually have the scale and team to justifiy them.

my point is strictly about premature optimizaton. ive seen teams spend their first month writing helm charts and terraform before they even have a single paying user. if you have product-market fit and need zero-downtime rollbacks, absolutly use k8s. but if youre just validatng an mvp, a vps and docker-compose (or sqlite) is usually enough to get off the ground.

its all about trade-offs tbh.