In almost any other scenario I feel the author is being intentionally obtuse about much of the reality surrounding technology decisions. An engineer operating a linux box running postgres & redis (or working in an environment with this approach) would become increasingly irrelevant & would certainly earn far less than the engineer operating the other. An engineering department following "complexity is not a virtue" would either struggle to hire or employ engineers considered up-to-date in 2006.

Management & EXCO would also have different incentives, in my limited observations I would say that middle and upper management are incentivised to increase the importance of thier respective verticals either in terms of headcount, budget or tech stack.

Both examples achieve a similar outcome except one is : scalable, fault tolerant, automated and the other is at best a VM at Hetzner that would be swiftly replaced should it have any importance to the org, the main argument here (and in the wild) seems to be "but its haaaard" or "I dont want to keep up with the tech"

KISS has a place and I certainly appreciate it in the software I use and operating systems I prefer but lets take a moment to consider the other folks in the industry who aren't happy to babysit a VM until they retire (or become redundant) before dispensing blanket advice like we are all at a 2018 ted talk . Thanks for coming to my ted talk

Trying to encourage any sort of camaraderie in environments where the default experience is that you are a disposable commodity is laughable.Even the revered workplace of google was firing employees with 20 years at the org by locking them out of slack to buy back their own shares. I would prefer knowing where I stand from day 1 than getting blindsided.