This reminds me of something I experienced
Back in 2000 I worked at a company that hired me to take over their brand new fully redundant web infrastructure. that was architected and built by a firm on a $10,000,000+ contract.
They couldn't understand why the site only served 1 page every 2 seconds. To be very clear: _1_ page every _2_ seconds.
The short story was the development company didn't have anyone who understood databases. So they were using the oracle cluster as a key-value store, and then parsing/sorting XML files on the application servers on demand.
This was a $500,000/yr oracle license, on redundant dedicated $(million) Sun hardware, with huge high speed disk arrays. They were almost sitting idle at peak load... of 1 page every 2 second.
Bonus story: The developer's didn't understand why their dynamic uploading of files to their app servers only worked 1/x of the time where X was the number of app servers in the cluster. They were dropping the files locally on the app-servers and wondering why the other app-servers didn't know about them.
It took a dry erase board and about 30 minutes before they truly understood that the filesystems on those devices were not shared and why. (note, it was never part of the design specification their own team created)
I'm happy that I didn't have to explain ephemeral containers to them.