Good point, for normal executives (whatever that means). In my little bubble most executives I have to deal with believe themselves to be on par with solution/enterprise architects and they like to show this by saying stuff like: "Let's use microservices and kubernetes for better scalability, everybody's doing it..."

did that before: running a single monolithic app inside a kubernetes cluster on a single pod. I still feel dirty after doing it.

My current hobby is to try and run monolithic apps like these on serverless services like cloud run. There's still some pain related to attaching persistent storage to a container but otherwise it feels like a great option.

A 64GB RAM instance on a cloud (which is what you're most likely using if you have K8S) will set you back a decent amount of money, even more so if you want one matching the specs that Stack Exchange actually uses.

If you need that level of performance you need to go bare-metal, and this is where you'll hit a lot of roadblocks (yet they will be happy to spend 10-100x more money trying to make do with the cloud).

Agreed, but would most engineers understand that they can keep the simplicity of the solution if the underlying infrastructure is based in the cloud/serverless/etc?

Fro my limited experience many engineers fall in the trap of adding accidental complexity to an otherwise simple architecture just by trying to use the latest/coolest cloud architecture trend.

Monolith in the cloud on kubernetes? Speak no such abomination. Of course we have to do microservices, the more the better. How can we scale otherwise?

SQL DB? What is this, 2010? Of course we're going to use Cosmos DB, how else could we get "single-digit millisecond response times, automatic and instant scalability, along with guarantee speed at any scale".

Of course I'm exaggerating for dramatic effect but I rarely see teams disciplined enough to keep cloud architectures simple and clean.

Keep in mind that the only reason this works is because it's all running on beefy bare-metal servers.

If you want to run it on Kubernetes I hope you know how to install/maintain K8S on-prem, because there's no way you're going to get this level of performance from any cloud provider (not at a sane price anyway).