Bleacher Report is a funny example: it used to be a darling example of Elixir, where a migration from Ruby -> Elixir claimed a move from "150 Ruby servers to 5 (probably overprovisioned) Elixir servers."[2] But then management and politics got scared, moved it all to more conventional tech, and the whole system suffered (see this legendary post[3]).
Fred Hebert describes a similar thing happening with a migration from Erlang deployments to Go/Docker/immutable, where you lose some pretty valuable capabilities by migrating to more conventional tech.[4]
I don't see this changing anytime soon -- we came of age when it was viable to attract investment with the promise of tech innovation. These days, those are liabilities because managers misunderstood the "Use Boring Technology" post the way consultants bartardized "Agile" (taking decent advice and misunderstanding it into something wholly different and horrifying). The result is you've got companies with customers in the 1000s using k8s, calling it "simple" and "Boring," whereas that same company would be called amateur if they did things like stateful deploys on-prem.[5]
At least we'll always have WhatsApp.
[1]: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/react-electron-llms-lab... [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170204160005/http://www.techwo... [3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/erlang/comments/18f3kl3/comment/kct... [4]: https://ferd.ca/a-pipeline-made-of-airbags.html [5]: https://morepablo.com/2023/05/where-have-all-the-hackers-gon...