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I know a friend that runs a nearly identical approach, but with PHP.

He creates a repo locally, works on a project of his liking, buys a VPS, "init"s an empty repo that syncs it with his local one, pushes it live, reverse proxy via NGINX, and goes live lol, that's it!

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Is this not, like... super common?

Not if you buy into the koolaid. The story is usually the same; the tool differs. A company decides to solve some problem and to get performance cycle “exposure dollars” someone posts a corporate tech blog post as a recruiting tool which then gets pumped and hyped by the advertising and PR dollars and a conference circuit follows shortly thereafter. The approach gets accepted as a “standard way” of doing something because the exposure crowds out anything else (he who screams the loudest). The benefit to the company is that if you know the tool before you join then there is less time spent ramping up and training on the job. Very often there’s virtually no benefit to the outside world but other approaches are soon forgotten due to indoctrination.

The reality is that context matters and it’s always the best approach to analyze your own problem carefully. Analyze the problem, seek quantifiable evidence (not just hearsay and opinion or social proof), lest you end up climbing in to your home through a high tech carbon fiber ladder to the roof, through the chimney instead of using a key and the door.

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