One guy (okay it was two guys) set up all the infrastructure and as soon as it was working bounced to new jobs with their newfound experience. The result is that dozens of engineers have no idea what the heck is going on and are lost navigating the numerous repos that hold various information related to deploying your feature.
In my opinion (and I’m sure my opinion has flaws!), unless you have global customers and your actual users are pushing 1k requests per second load on your application servers/services, there is no reason to have these levels of abstractions. However once this becomes reality I think everyone working on that responsibility needs to learn k8s and whatever else. Otherwise you are screwed once the dude who set this up left for another job.
And honestly.. I’ve built software using node for the application services and managed Postgres/cache instances with basic replication to handle heavy traffic (10-20k rps) within 100ms. It requires heavy use of YAGNI and a bit of creativity tho which engineers seem to hate because they may not get to use the latest and shiniest tech. Totally understand but if you want money printer to go brrr you need to use the right tool for the job at the right time.