> Pretty amazing that the military industrial complex was of sufficient importance to him that he used his farewell address to warn against it. And now it is just treated as an absolute necessity never to be scrutinized.
You completely misunderstand the purpose of the speech.
The speech is an acknowledgement that it was necessary due to the changing nature of warfare and geopolitics [0], but at the same time warning that it we should be vigilant about not allowing government to be captured by it.
The same way the banking or tech industries are important and necessary, but shouldn't be allowed to directly further their own interests by setting government policy, but with additional moral gravity given the nature of the military.
[0] this was an era where military weaponry was becoming sophisticated enough that you couldn't just e.g. convert civilian car factories to produce tanks anymore, and you wouldn't have time to do it either, because the ICBMs and long range bombers on the horizon removed the invulnerability of the US mainland. Sitting tight to build up a military over the course of multiple years as was the case during WWII was no longer an option, so combined with the threat of the Soviet Union it was obvious that the US would need to maintain a large standing military and the accompanying industries for the first time in it's history. It was a novel, necessary, and nonetheless dangerous development, and that's what he was trying to get across.