> At least in my experience I find this push for micro services, async, reactive, cloud, kubernetes, kafka which are part of "we are going state of the art" narrative is just to appear slick.

I can second this. If your stuff runs fine on a VM and provides more in value than it costs to support, then there’s no reason to move unless those technologies provide demonstrable/tangible value above and beyond their costs.

As for both of your comments, I’m also admittedly taking a swing for the fences here based on my read of the environment. A lot of metaphorical checks were written with the intent AI will pay them in full (or whatever the next fad is), but at some point the proverbial bill always comes due.