Your whole argument boils down to "don't write shit software" which yeah, fair, but in the real world, the company that you just joined has shit code that evolved over 10 years and has accumulated all sorts of legacy cruft. The idea that there is "absolutely no need to launch a set of ad-hoc self-contained services to run a service locally and work on it" just doesn't match the reality of most places I've worked at. You either got very lucky or you didn't work on complex enough systems.