[jamesfinlayson]

> This can lead to awkward conversations of the type where the manager suggests "let's do/use X" where X was the best practice 5+ years ago and then it has to be diplomatically explained to him/her that's no longer the best practice

I wish managers would understand that it's not their job to do that any more - I've had a few technical managers in my time and the best one was totally hands off, except when he recognised a scenario that had caused him grief in the past (e.g. boolean fields in a database or anything completely over-engineered). The other ones have just rapidly descended into "I'm the manager therefore my opinion is final" (including one who had never worked with Java, PHP, MySQL, serverless or AWS but didn't let it stop him from having strongly held technical opinions).