The microservices fad/wave was where people seemed to lose their minds. The "Solving Imaginary Scaling Issues (at scale)" meme encapsulated it for me. Most programmers of the time seemed far more interested in being architecture astronauts than making something useful. The overengineered hosting setups were also a major impediment to anyone who just wanted to make something useful.

Fortunately, AI-assisted coding seems to be wrestling back coding from developers and re-empowering domain experts and systems analysts. A full recession will probably shake out a lot more of the waste in software development.