There is now an entire generation of developers steeped in SaaS who literally don’t know how to do anything else, and have this insanely distorted picture of how much power is needed to do simple things.

It’s hard to hire people to do anything else. People don’t know how to admin machines so forget bare metal even though it can be thousands of times cheaper for some work loads (especially bandwidth).

You’re not exaggerating with a raspberry pi. Not at all.