Interesting.
I'd like to think that, most probably, your job exists and is funded because those folks (and you) "got shit done" for the last 20 years.
In my experience (around 2 decades also), when it comes to small/medium projects, spending a bit of effort separating business logic from UI/database/server code is wise up to a certain point.
If the effort doesn't add too much code and layers of indirection, then fine.
However, DDD/HexagonalArch consultants tend to add soo much boilerplate and layers of indirection between between an HTTP request and a response that it becomes detrimental to productivity.
For example take a look at this article:
https://herbertograca.com/2017/11/16/explicit-architecture-0...
Specially this part (but the entire article is a gem):
> This means that Dependency Injection and Dependency Inversion are not enough to decouple components, we will need some sort of architectural constructs. We might need events, a shared kernel, eventual consistency, and even a discovery service!
Respectfully I'd like to think that it is satire. But it isn't.
With events your code is no longer linear. Stuff happens with triggers (events) that are not clear at first glance unless you fully understand the entire stack.
Shared kernel is just a place to shove interfaces under the carpet and pretend code is no longer coupled because you added extra 2 layers of indirection (interfaces and kernel) between 2 lines of code. Congrats now it became much harder to understand what actual code will be executed when I call this method.
Eventual consistency... Is that a good thing? We spent 4 decades maturing ACID compliant transactional RDBMS only for someone to come and disregard all these gains?
Discovery service... Yeah your code became so complex that you need more code to discover code. Because we can't have one layer calling another directly. Nonono, that would be coupling. And coupling makes it hard to change frameworks in a distant but slightly possible future. I'd rather pay a very expensive insurance from now on to safeguard from that possibility. Even though the insurance itself is so expensive that it alone can suffocate the project.
Sorry for the rant.