> But yeah, let's just spin-up a shadow IT VM with Debian like GP said, it's easy!

That’s literally how they sold AWS in the beginning.

Cloud won not because of costs or flexibility but because it allowed teams to provision their own machines from their budget instead of going through all the red tape with their IT departments creating… a bunch of shadow IT VMs!

Everything old is new again, except it works on an accelerated ten year cycle in the IT industry.

Indeed. And it stems from the illusion that what works in solo/small teams/scrappy startup works the same when you are bigger, and that a developer can take over all the corollary work to the actual product development.

And yes, a dev that's able to do that properly (stress on properly) is indeed a signal of a better overall developer but they are a minority and anyway as orgs scale up there is just too much of "side salad" that it becomes a separated dish.