You are not wrong. But it is all about saving money on labor. The rest are just the constraints of the system you use. (Aka requirements) its like complaining about the need to use posix for Linux.
You’d simply upload an ear or ear and the server and deployed would handle configuration like db etc.
It worked perfectly (ear/war, the persistence framework was too verbose and high level imo, but that was replaced by hibernate/jpa). There was too much configuration in xml, but that could easily be replaced my convention, annotations and some config
Again.. we are running in circles, and this industry will never learn, because most “senior” people haven’t been around long enough.
And that likely won't change in our lifetime, given the rate of growth in demand for software: we literally can't create senior engineers fast enough for there to be enough to go around.
As an aside, I have the privilege of working with a couple of senior folks right now in my current gig, and it's pretty fucking fantastic.
What's the biggest idea you've seen abandoned and then reinvented with a new name?
Optimistically, it could represent a positive trade-off that replaces perpetual upkeep with upfront effort, and all-hours patching and on-call with 9-5 coding.
In practice, I think a lot of those fixed costs get paid too often to ever come out ahead, especially since ops effort is often per-server or per-cluster. The added dev effort is probably a fixed or scaling cost per feature, and if code changes fast enough then a slower development workflow is a far bigger cost than trickier upkeep.
Moving off-hours work into predictable, on-hours work is an improvement even at equal times, but I'm not sure how much it actually happens. Outages still happen, and I'm not sure serverless saves much less out-of-hours ops time compared to something like Kubernetes.
Now that guy's workload doubled and needs another colleague to be able to deliver.