Too often I see developers not thinking about KISS, produce very complex and slow systems. And as a solution to improve the performance, they decide to throw 10x more cloud infra against it instead of thinking a bit harder.
I've come to think that scale out is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you choose a solution that's designed to support scale out, then all the mechanisms and limitations (yes, limitations) it needs to adopt in order to make distributed processing work will impose a burden of overhead that you will need to offset by scaling out.
I haven't seen any certificates that replace sweat and hard work yet, except in organizations where they cannot keep track of individual developer performance and simply count certificates.