Future of platforms is operators in k8s to abstract the developer need to the underlying systems. On local it maps to kvm, on gke it maps to their stuff, on AWS to RDS. It's "interfaces" on a platform level so devs can just ask for a thing.

Overall I agree though, this is a bit of an abuse of that concept.

EDIT: I'm sure op is familiar with this workflow but I'm being overly verbose to clarify what I think they mean and my thoughts.