Yeah... sometimes you get a junior engineer who's drunk the koolaid a bit too much and think they need a bunch of fancy tech for their web dashboarding dealing

Yeah... sometimes you get a junior engineer who's drunk the koolaid a bit too much and think they need a bunch of fancy tech for their web dashboarding dealing with 5 req/s. But I think it's pessimistic to reduce it to people trying to make the job more interesting, and at least with more senior people it's often about reusing technologies internally. For instance, an application may have a use case that requires very high messaging rates, so they build up a team to operate Kafka clusters. Then later you end up with a bunch of teams using Kafka when far simpler things would do the trick, because it's already available and there's a whole team supporting it, with expertise to debug it if things go wrong. It doesn't look good if you take the system on its own, but in context it's a pretty reasonable decision. IMHO sometimes this reasoning goes too far (I've seen people suggest we rewrite super relational apps to NoSQL to avoid operating SQL DBs!), but it usually comes from good intentions.