I remember the good old days of having to script my own deployments on our own on-prem servers, with linter free wild west testing. It went to crap pretty easily because we were always customizing something, automating something, customizing the automating of something. Dependency checking was also very manual.

Nowadays we work with way more traffic that incentivizes strict bin packing of traffic within the tightest bounds of the resource pool, with the fastest actuation time. VMs won't give you that. Containerization just makes that so much easier and snappier for large amounts of traffic. But then we had to go global, and orchestrating containers across continents is a PITA. So there's value in k8s for dealing with that. These tools vastly reduce the complexity with regards to managing globally distributed services. But as usual, we start customizing these tools, leading to more complexity.

With that said, I believe startups need to focus on the fastest development and deployment times. So stuff like Docker, Kubernetes or Terraform are entirely unnecessary. As I commented elsewhere before, no one with a total QPS of 10 needs anything beyond GCE or EC2 or on-prem servers. People born in the Cloud age seem to have forgotten that they can just run the cheapest Linux machine with HAProxy and httpd behind a static IP. The focus on always going straight to Cloud complexity, if anything, smells more like engineers in on some VC grift.

Side note: It's hard to hire senior/motivated Java developers. It became a self-fulfilling cycle. Happened somewhere around 2011-2014, no one other than fresh grads graduating from legacy courses still used Java or .NET.