I'd like to add another one: I don't need a separate NodeJS (or whatever engine) service to build my service dashboard. Before NodeJS got popular, backend engineers like me simply put web assets into a folder in my web app, so my service will have an admin page or a dashboard for per-node administrations. For some reason, such practice has become a taboo. My engineers have been insisting that they set up a separate NodeJS service just to build even a simple admin page. But I fail to see why. The reasons I got are usually these three: 1) a NodeJS service gives us optimized performance, though techniques like server-side rendering; 2) a separate service is easier to scale; 3) a separate service offers separation of concerns. However, 1) and 2) are premature optimization to me. All I need is standardized per-node admin page for my service. The QPS is probably one per day by a human. Why would I care about SSR or scalability at all? And 3) is quite hand-wavy. On the other hand, the overhead of managing a separate service as well as the dependencies brought by NodeJS' ecosystem seems high.

So, what's wrong with the old way of having embedded web assets in a service for building simple admin pages?