Which is typically a symptom of having worked at a start-up vs. an established company.

During the dot-com crash, I went from working at a 40 person start-up to a 25,000 employee utility company, and it was a real eye opener. A lot of my "cutting edge" (for the time) skills were dismissed as being flash in the pan, and all the "real work" was done with tried and trued technologies. I ended up finding my way back to a start-up a few years later, and everything was reversed again.

That says "startup". ML is the buzzword that investors love, and k8s/devops allows avoiding big investment into infrastructure which may need to be dropped anyway when it turns out the market doesn't actually want yet another "apply ML to click stream to save on ads costs" startup (I'm stereotyping of course but you get the idea).

It’s actually some what ironic considering how much SV pushes for diversity and inclusion.. unless you’re over 40.

1) was "keeping up with their skills", not "trendy". "Keeping up with your skills" does not mean "know JS/ML/k8s" for a wide range of developers.