There's a world of a difference of someone doing that for a Google scale thing with big teams supporting it, or say a core part of making the best wireguard pro

There's a world of a difference of someone doing that for a Google scale thing with big teams supporting it, or say a core part of making the best wireguard product that only they can do, vs a system that could have been postgres and now when the authors leave for their own sqlite-by-mail startup or are partying at SREConf for the 'our n+1th attempt to not do postgres' and an outage causes an unnecessary and ungoogleable shitshow for their colleagues. A good engineer can build all sorts of surprising things. A senior one knows why they should reserve that for only the special bits. I like reading the first two types of articles -- we frequently give tech talks ourselves -- but for making boring systems weird, I get flashbacks of consultantware/resumeware/NIH that took ages to weed out. I try to give talks on say GPUs for weirdly shaped problems, not on why we celebrated when we finally had time to rip out mongo from where it didn't belong :)