I'm not familiar with Adapt before this post, but in general, yeah, a componentized backend is a very popular approach, particularly on Kubernetes, e.g., with tools like Jsonnet, Kustomize, Helm (umbrella) charts.
"Next gen" alternatives to Terraform like Pulumi also take a different approach to similar ideas.
You might also be interested in Cloud Native Application Bundles [1].
[Update: If I'm understanding Adapt right, it looks like Adapt is going for similar ideas but doing the configuration management in JSX and attempting to automate much of the DevOps details for the end user. It sort of looks like how Create React App insulates one from Webpack for common use cases. If it works as well as it sounds in the tutorial, this could be an easier to get up and running alternative to e.g., a Docker Compose setup, for someone whose skills are more on the frontend side.]
That is exactly the idea behind Adapt (and said better than I've been saying it). The goal is to hide all the DevOps details but still make it easy to customize the parts that you need to customize via JSX and React concepts.
If you check out some of the components in adapt/cloud/src, most of them are small too, and just use other simpler components like LocalDockerImage, DockerContainer, RepositoryImage, etc.
"Next gen" alternatives to Terraform like Pulumi also take a different approach to similar ideas.
You might also be interested in Cloud Native Application Bundles [1].
[Update: If I'm understanding Adapt right, it looks like Adapt is going for similar ideas but doing the configuration management in JSX and attempting to automate much of the DevOps details for the end user. It sort of looks like how Create React App insulates one from Webpack for common use cases. If it works as well as it sounds in the tutorial, this could be an easier to get up and running alternative to e.g., a Docker Compose setup, for someone whose skills are more on the frontend side.]
[1]: https://cnab.io/