> What are people doing where rewriting tens of thousands of dev hours of work from scratch makes more sense than spending money on servers?
1) "spend money on servers" is a boring solution. This is no good if you are a career software engineer and your career, salary and prestige within the company depends on writing code.
2) thanks to the cloud, server/infrastructure is now priced with ~100x margins, so "spend money on servers" is a significant investment, with these (stupid) moves to serverless/etc being seen as a cost-saving measure (that of course just like with the cloud itself supposedly being cheaper will never actually materialize).
I also agree with the sentiment, although two "but..."s did come to mind so I'll play Devil's Advocate:
1: does this contribute to the inefficiency and bloat we see on the web and applications nowadays? Of course everyone complains about Discord and Teams and other Electron apps (which aren't a direct comparison) but one I deal with regularly is the Microsoft Power BI Gateway application, which allows access to on-prem data for reports and automations. I'm sure it does a little more than just establish connections to Azure and send data, but it's a 672MB download! That's larger than the ISO for Windows XP. Throwing more hardware at a problem becomes less effective when the application has fundamental inefficiencies.
2: although server hardware is affordable compared to western salaries, a lot of the world has far less purchasing power and server hardware prices aren't as regional as labor costs. So some developers may have more time than money for more silicon. I haven't run any numbers on this and doesn't mean that rolling your own "everything" is worthwhile.
And can run multiple apps.
That's not a disadvantage unless you failed at life.
I'm sick of reading threads where people disparage normal application architecture for completely stupid reasons.