> What they should have done is adopt Heroku as their internal Platform-as-a-Service
From what I saw, Heroku was unsuitable for a serious large company. Deploy-on-push is a nice UX for a small company, but once you need something more structured, it wasn't enough.
I previously deployed stuff to Salesforce when I ran a very large Asia-Pacific Salesforce org.
The previous way (prior to SFDX which was clearly influenced by Heroku) was terrible. 12 hour long deploys that end when one unit test times out-style terrible. No code history terrible. There is no way that Heroku was worse for integration.
Whether they could have replaced APEX with Heroku is a different issue.
Can you elaborate on your claim it’s not enough? PasS (platform as a service) has been transformative for modern infrastructure. Containers for better, or worse, have made deployments substantially “easier,” giving every org the ability to provide Heroku like services. But, Heroku provided this sort of ease, and more, long before containers ate the world. And regardless of containers themselves, I fail to see how something “more structured” would even exist. Deploy on push is still subject to being merged and everywhere I’ve worked has had no shortage of checks and approvals to merge.
That lacks imagination. There's no corporate workflow that can't ultimately translate to moving git tags.