Not OP, but over the last year, I've worked in 4 startups. (A) reached a $100m Series C. (B) had a tech stack that was far too complicated for what it needed which opened my eyes to how badly teams can shoot themselves in the foot with K8s. (C) was at YCombinator graduate that increased their ARR by $1m in the last month. (D) was funded based on a pitch deck and a bunch of former FAANG.

(B) had 200 unique visitors a month and a stack built on Kubernetes with something like 8 microservices. It was running Apollo, Socket.io, and on and on; literally overcomplicating everything...for 200 unique visitors a month. Every single aspect of that system was over-complicated. CTO was part of the problem, but was complicit in letting tech team go wild; many of whom just up and left after playing around with the tech.

(D) on the other hand had the exact problem that OP described: they started going hog wild building multi-layered service-oriented architecture when the system barely has any traffic. Deployment is a pain. Code is copy-pasted everywhere because the alternative is to publish and pull packages and that's a lot of friction. Team can code, but barely understands the tech stack.

(C) built the dumbest architecture I've ever seen. Shit was stapled together. Webhooks were constantly failing due to quota pressure. Their Firestore queries were inefficient and their sloppy migrations led to many broken documents in the store. But guess what? They are actually growing in this economic environment because they solved a real problem without worrying about growth until they actually saw the growth.

(A) built his solution in Angular because that's what he knew and didn't try to jump on React or other hype.

At (C) (the YC startup), I had a conversation with the COO that I'll never forget. We were discussing an architectural decision which would have scalability and stability impact down the line. What he said was to the effect that "We have 10,000 users today and if we lost them all, there are still 7 billion people. We'll find another 10,000". He made it clear that they wouldn't be happy about it, but that it's speed above all else.

> If you are free to choose the absolute best tool you have at your reach, why wouldn't you?

The purpose of a startup isn't to play around with tech: it's to find product-market fit and zero in on the business value. If you think of a startup as a place to play around with tech, you have no place in a startup.

You should almost always choose the "dumbest" possible technology used in the "dumbest" possible way so that you can hire anyone and they can step in and be productive when you need to scale. It minimizes ramp up time. It minimizes deployment and operational complexity. It minimizes the ways the system can fail. Literally build the dumbest thing that solves the core business problem that creates value for the user and then figure it out from there.