K8s, service meshes, all this infrastructure complexity to me seems like more of a band-aid to bad backend practices and lack of standardization.

This kind of world arises if an org has, say 1000 engineers, or ~100-200 teams, and every team wants to do their own thing with accountability improperly mapped etc.

And infrastructure engineers turn into police with an obvious overemphasis on observability.

I guess a large amount of complexity in infra and wastage is done to hide human inefficiencies.