New lead came in, got rid of that crap by using 3rd party services to spin up infrastructure. Got a load balancer, a few VMs + DB. Reduced the cost down by 85% and greatly simplified the entire stack.
I learned a really valuable lesson without having to make that mistake myself.
I understand why people get excited about tooling. It's cool to learn new things and automate stuff away. I'm prone to that myself and do this on my own server when I get that itch.
Having said that, it's wrong to foist this stuff onto an unsuspecting company where the owners don't know any better about tech, that's why they hire other people to do that for them and seeing that just left a bad taste in my mouth for overcomplicated setups.
I get that SV is different, that's why tools like K8 are made and I would jump on those tools on a heartbeat as needed.
But for other smaller businesses, the truth is they just need a boring monolothic load balanced app with a few VMs and a DB sprinkled with 3rd party services for logging or searching or other stuff not core to the business.