They are the shit tech that will be abandoned with the next fad. They are a huge boondoggle, solely for the immature leads who have not been coding for decades and know better. This industry is filled with stupid fucks that don't know tech history.
Being in Ops, and having first been paid to do sysadmin work 30 years ago, and having been raised by semiconductor industry veterans, it's pretty safe to say I know tech history.
Having experienced plenty of that history first-hand, including learning to "know better" the hard way, has resulted in a certain amount of conservatism and skepticism toward any new technology, especially one that gains popularity with particular speed.
However, "skepticism" isn't a synonym for "summary dismissal", but, rather, actual skepticism in the sense of asking uncomfortable questions and paying attention to the answers, even they end up being uncomfortable to hear. That's how we grow and, ultimately, know even better.
I've also learned that I enjoy working in smaller companies and/or startup environments far more than the alternative and this has, inevitably, required adapting to some amount of the "move fast and break things" method. Even if its genesis is with leads that can legitimately be labeled as "immature", it merely increases risk, and risk is inherent in startups anyway.
As it applies to my evaluation of new tech, it usually means I get to evaluate it already in operation, instead of merely asking questions. Often, that empirical data is far more valuable, even in forming an argument to stop using that tech.
All that said, so far, I can't help but agree with your assessment of "boondoggle" when all the layers of abstraction, complexity, and cost are included in, languages, ci/cd, virtualization/containers, orchestration, and cloud.
Disclaimer: Infra/DevOps engineer previously, 20 years total in tech
I’m imagining a thought experiment... the requirements to understand and operate in this industry... for example this article that was posted . Imagine giving it out at a family reunion and asking each relative if it makes any sense at all. Even the ones who are developers might only get a small gist of it if they program java code. For humans to digest decades of information written by 1000s of other humans in terse code ... it’s a daunting task which is married to the side effect of accidentally repeating past mistakes. Maybe if we had an Oracle to help us... oh wait that’s a terrible joke