> Vercel and Netlify (among others) try and avoid the basic necessity of databases and other backend complexities as if a front-end developer can exist in some shining, pretty land free of that yucky backend stuff.

They are creating the disease and selling you the cure. You see less monoliths in the node community because it's the only ecosystem where the attempting to build a monolith takes you off of the happy path. Most tools and frameworks not-so gently nudge you in the SPA + back-end-as-a-service direction and make the simple thing hard.