PornHub has significantly more content than Netflix, not to mention the ability for users to upload content and have it immediately available worldwide. That alone makes it significantly more complex than Netflix.

I think one of the reasons behind PornHub's tech stack is that their industry doesn't really lend itself to VC, so building an engineering playground for PH would be a waste of money as no amount of complexity would net them VC money (nor an invite to a cloud provider conference), where as most startups live and die based on the VC funding their complexity and buzzwords allow them to grift.

I think the takeaway was that choice of language might be less important than engineering strategy, because PH are successful despite their choice of stack :)