I think far too many things have been absurdly overcomplicated beyond their need. Shell scripts were fine. curl-hash-run doesn’t need nodejs. Ansible and Chef are actually overkill if you’ve only got one or three annoying pet servers left at work. The burden and overhead of having to constantly update the automation that was supposed to make your life simpler isn’t worth it.

You can do a lot more as a team when you only use brand name tools where they actually make sense, and write some bash otherwise. And guess what - if you come back to a bash script 3 years later you won’t first have to jump through 17 version updates, schema changes, and major schisms in the best practice wars that happened while you didn’t pay attention.

Overcomplicating automation with off the shelf tooling is as much of an antipattern as everyone thinking they need to migrate to kubernetes for their blog. Let’s be honest, you probably should have spent all that time you were migrating to k8s making sure your backups actually work. Because they almost definitely do not.
@maxine second person this week with that sentiment.
@janl 3am delirium lets me connect to the hivemind
@maxine nodejs itself is not a terrible dependency and doesn't tend to engage in the kind of version pushing behavior of cpython at all. i have coffeescript projects using makefiles that still build and run from over a decade ago
@hipsterelectron it's not a terrible dependency, but it's imo a terrible runtime for CI that's inexplicably become the default