Again, I don't generally disagree with you. But as our team is growing at my day job, I am finding more and more that we're getting bitten by some developer's "

Again, I don't generally disagree with you. But as our team is growing at my day job, I am finding more and more that we're getting bitten by some developer's "It works on my machine" or a random npm failure at deploy time. And this makes me believe that having a prebuilt (immutable, hermetically sealed) artefact that I can later deploy is the way to go. Containers solve this problem nicely. And once you're going down the container route, you need something like a Kubernetes to easily schedule and network them. My personal site -- the one you're reading the article on -- is literally just a static nginx server on an old Linux box (with the files copied in by rsync). Even the curmudgeon in me now thinks it makes sense to use solutions of different complexity for different situations.