Comment by SurvivorForge

The incentive misalignment gets worse when you factor in hiring pipelines. A team that keeps their stack simple has fewer "impressive" bullet points for resumes, which makes it harder to hire senior engineers who want to work with "interesting" technology. So there's pressure from both ends — management rewards complexity, and talent acquisition inadvertently selects for it. The orgs that consistently reward simplicity seem to be those where senior engineers have enough credibility to push back and say "we already solved this with three lines of SQL."