I wonder if this isn't so much about the tech itself, but rather the expectation that the best realistic outcome for a startup is an aquihire. Following the cur

I wonder if this isn't so much about the tech itself, but rather the expectation that the best realistic outcome for a startup is an aquihire. Following the current "industry best practice", even if it's more expensive and might not even make sense for your product requirements, is just insurance that your acquisition will pass a future tech compliance audit: a buyer will want to be able to support your product and cannibalize it if necessary and that's harder to do if it's written in a lesser-known language/framework. This also goes some way to explain the leetcode, "hiring only the best from Stanford/MIT" hiring nonsense for pretty mediocre cookie-cutter products that could be perfectly well executed by couple mid-range developers: your developers' resumes are as much a part of any potential acquihire package as the codebase and user data.