I believe there's still a lot of potential for building niche / "human-scale" services/businesses, that don't inherently require the scalability of the cloud or

I believe there's still a lot of potential for building niche / "human-scale" services/businesses, that don't inherently require the scalability of the cloud or complexity of k8s. Scaling vertically is always easier, modern server hardware has insane perf ceiling. The overall reduction in complexity is a breath of fresh air. My occasional moral dilemma is idle power usage of overprovisioned resources, but we've found some interesting things to throw at idle hardware to ease our conscience about it.