i see one person saying it is now cheap to support the new hotness, which previously would have been its own project, and another saying it has become cheap again to do things the boring-yet-reliable way that maybe didn’t used to scale so great.

that's fair. probably i attached more weight to the opening line: "We're in an interesting time where my framework/stack choice is now much less dictated by existing engineer expertise and more about fundamental capabilities in the framework and stack themselves."

assuming author wouldn't choose X _just because_ it is the new hotness