What we were struggling with were "conditional services" like running Integration Tests. We only wanted to add that container to the cluster when we wanted to run the tests.

Same with the "demo" mode we added. That spins up an Nginx container with an example front-end app.

It's theoretically possible to define all of the containers in one big Docker Compose config and then turn them on/off with env variables per environment, but it's just hellish to debug. In fact, I suspect that's what the engineer that wrote those started with before getting frustrated with spaghetti.

Sometimes there is just no winning with the computers lol

Edit: Answering the "it isn't 4 commands" bit -- if you just restart a container it won't pick up changes to the Docker Compose config. You have to remove it an add it back to the cluster.