You can still take the 2010 approach and just run everything on Rails and Postgres. It’ll be a long time before any startup outgrows that stack, and by the time they do they’ll have the ability to rewrite like Twitter did.

Anyone who starts off with anything more than that (or Django or your favorite language’s equivalent) is just wasting time and effort trying to be trendy. Over-engineering a startup only serves to keep you from testing market fit, which is only a good plan if you’re trying to milk more investment money because you know you’re going to fail as soon as you launch.

that's a tech view only. Startup-ing is harder because incumbents in innovative business have built huge moats, in pharma, chemistry, web, mobile, etc. Big business are more ready to react to disrupting newcomers by pricing them out, lobbying for new rules, buying them out, etc. Incumbents are also reaching a global scale that generates in itself such an advantage...

> Now you “need” half of npm, react, backend, devops etc to get started.

Says who? You can literally spin up nearly any server computing infrastructure imaginable in a matter of seconds. Just because software is getting bloated under the covers, doesn't mean its any harder.