I've been coding for over a decade, mostly backend systems, and I'm starting to wonder if we're overcomplicating software architecture. Microservices, Kubernetes, event-driven everything—sometimes I miss the days when a simple monolith just worked. Don't get me wrong, I've seen distributed systems handle scale beautifully, but for most small to medium projects, are the operational costs really worth it? A friend of mine runs a startup with three engineers and they spend half their time managing infrastructure instead of building features. So, is all this complexity genuinely necessary, or are we just following trends because big tech does it? I'm genuinely curious where other developers draw the line between scaling for the future and overengineering for today.