[bcrosby95]

> Isn't the purpose of a technical architecture to optimize for the former (assuming engineering is a cost-center)?

The companies that developed these things are employing hundreds or thousands of engineers. So, yeah, they are optimizing for engineering costs when you have thousands of engineers. They are building systems that cannot be fully understood by a single person. If you don't have thousands of engineers, their solutions to their problem won't necessarily be your solution to your problem.

Complex beasts like microservices and event driven architecture are about enabling huge engineering departments to make changes to huge systems without constantly stepping on eachothers toes.

Ignoring headcount, they are actually very inefficient because systems designed like this necessarily has tons of duplicated effort across the organization. Those inefficiencies are made up by reducing the amount of communication required between thousands of people and hundreds of teams to change and maintain the system. But if your department isn't huge then the communication overhead is less than the duplicated effort, which tends to make these designs a poor choice.

These sorts of things usually do not scale down. If you have 1,000 services and 5 engineers there's a 99.999% chance you're doing it wrong. 5 engineers is not even enough employees to manage, monitor, and build the requisite tooling to make efficient use of a system distributed across 1,000 services, much less build and understand the system as a whole.