>Nobody makes you use YAML and Docker and VS Code or whatever your beef is.

Not VS Code, but maybe YAML and Docker if your company is trying to align what tools it uses. C# places might still force you to use Visual Studio proper. Everyone says use the right tool for the job, but for bog standard CRUD web development, we do have a shitload of tools that work and there's multiple ways to get to a fast, working product.

I still chuckle that my laptop is 3 times as fast as the cloud thing that serves our CRUD app and we pay many more times for it, but also knowing full well I do not ever want to be RDP'ing into a production box again and pouring through IIS or Windows logs.

What I definitely do see is a degradation in making choices about when to adopt a more complicated technology because of the incentives of the hiring market.

People have loudly beaten the drum to keep your skills up to date and so people choose stuff that's popular because it benefits them personally, even when the product doesn't need it. This in turn leads companies to only select people who know that stack, and the more that companies do that, the more people make technical choices to get them the best job that they can handle.

We absolutely, very much 100% see that happening now with LLM AI if you ever needed a bigger piece of proof. Pretty much everything that is happening now has just been a louder example of every bad practice since the run up to the dotcom bust.

Because of that, I'd frankly never suggest running on-prem or building a local-only app unless there was a much bigger reason (legal, security, whatever) especially if the other products in the company have chosen the cloud.

Why? Because convincing the next job that that would have been the right choice is too hard.

Edit: and to someone else's point, I made the choice to be in the Microsoft/Azure/Windows hell hole but digging myself out and moving to something else is practically working a second full-time job and holding 2 ecosystems in my head at once