Reading the article, I'd fully expected a post-mortem at the end, describing how architecture and code review processes were going to be tightened up to ensure

Reading the article, I'd fully expected a post-mortem at the end, describing how architecture and code review processes were going to be tightened up to ensure a monstrosity like this never happened again - that would have been transparent, interesting, and given me confidence in Plaid's engineering. Instead, you've peppered this thread with comments that kind-of, sort-of justify the approach taken. I'm sorry, but this approach cannot be justified - it's overly complex, and far from the simplest or most obvious approach. I'm truely shocked that Plaid has produced an architecture like this, and doubly so that Plaid would try to justify it. My guess here (and given the attempts at justification, this is me being really charitable) is that a junior dev was given too much leeway, and did some resume-driven-development, just so they could say they'd worked with 4k containers.