Yes, I think devs sometimes forget that this is the bleeding-est of bleeding edges. Hell, I can't even get a normal Digital Ocean server instance to programmatically drop and recreate doing minimal things like creating a user and setting SSH keys. I suppose if I wanted to learn something heavyweight like Chef or Puppet I could, but for now, I just maintain a list of commands to run, and understand that Digital Ocean servers can't quite be treated like livestock just yet, though I can fake it pretty well. Eventually Digital Ocean will get around to making the platform changes, which are all already in feature request.

Engineering time is very limited and the support cases are exponentially large. The author wanted MongoDB supported in the hard case. Well, that means you also need to support 4 or 5 other, similar databases the same way.

If you want a bleeding-edge PaaS with corporate support, you should expect to pay corporate prices. If the project / organization doesn't allow for that, then either the requirements or the mindset is off-kilter.

I think the what the author is really mad about is the vendor lock-in. That used to bother me too, until I realized that learning new platforms is done on my employer's dime and not mine.

A few more years, and some other challenge will be on the bleeding edge and this one will be mostly solved, meaning that open-source community solutions will exist that you can build once and forget about it. Knowing most devs, they'll spend all their time complaining about whatever the new edge is instead of marveling at how much easier things are now compared to the 'bad old days' of 2015.