[mtrovo]

You mean I could serve my 10 active user application on a literal potato writing data to Google Sheets, instead of spinning up a five node container cluster with ten microservices each? How would my solution architect justify his job then?

Jokes aside, I don't think this is really cargo cult. It seems more like people genuinely believe in adding bloat just to get promotions or bragging rights. In my opinion, actual cargo cult behavior would be a novice saying they want to solve a front-end slowness issue by migrating the whole application to React because "React just works, dude." Or it could be the Stackoverflow-driven development approach, which is now evolving into ChatGPT-driven development.

But the real winner is when there's a development process problem, and someone says, "What we need is Agile!" as if requiring the team to follow ceremonies that no stakeholders care about will magically fix everything.