I made that comment once about "Soylent". (Remember Soylent? The nutritional drink?) That company made a big deal about their "tech stack". Not for manufacturing or quality control, but for ordinary web processing. Their order volume was so low that a CGI program on a low-end shared hosting system could do the job. But they were going to "scale", right?
Amusingly, they eventually did "scale". They started selling through WalMart in bulk, and accepted their fate as yet another nutritional drink, on the shelves alongside Ensure Plus and Muscle Milk. Their "tech stack" was irrelevant to that.
That's an amusing story. I suppose the Soylent board met a good salesperson, and the pitch worked. So when the team landed the contract, they had to justify their costs some way... I suspect almost every software project in existence is in some way a victim (or beneficiary...) of fanatical marketing.
I remember working on an simple CMS site, amongst other things, for a pretty large company. When we begun the project, we were tasked with re-purposing an overworked Plesk instance to host the site. We eventually managed to do it, but then found the small amount of disk space that was left to us was getting chewed up by logs.
So I reported this to my project manager, suggesting that we procure more HD space. I think I said something about us 'running out of memory on our hard drive'. The PM promised to feed this back to the client... A week later, our PM said that he and the client had resolved the issue. The client will pay for a new server with a stonking 96GB of RAM!!!
That ought fix our 'memory' issue, right!!?
I mean, it also came with a 1TB HD, a second box for redundancy, dev time for migration, and additional dev time for a switch to Journald, or Logrotate, so I wasn't rushing to point out the misunderstanding... Working with the second box over RedHat Pacemaker was all new to us though, and a complete PITA.
But it was also another 'feature' to sell back to the client. They loved the sound of that. A site that couldn't go down... We made it work, but there was absolutely no real technical need for a Pacemaker cluster and 96GB*2 of RAM. It was just a simple CMS backed site.
Occasionally, that's where such complexity comes from. Not the developers themselves, but some loose cannon of a saleperson. That said, these 'sales people' may even be developers themselves. I often think that's a large part of how and why questionably complicated software exists...
Amusingly, they eventually did "scale". They started selling through WalMart in bulk, and accepted their fate as yet another nutritional drink, on the shelves alongside Ensure Plus and Muscle Milk. Their "tech stack" was irrelevant to that.