It's sure a corny stance to hold if you're navigating an infrastructure nightmare daily, but in my opinion, much of the complexity addresses not technical, but organisational issues: You want straightforward, self-contained deployments for one, instead of uploading files onto your single server. If the process crashes or your harddisk dies, you want redundancy so even those twelve customers can still access the appli…
I think that's a slightly different set of things to what OP is complaining about though. They're much more reasonable, but also "outside" of the application. Having secret management or CI (pretty much mandatory!) does not dictate the architecture of the application at all. (except the caching layer. Remember the three hard problems of computer science, of which cache invalidation is one.) Still hoping for a good "s…
Oh, it absolutely does. You need some way to get your secrets into the application, at build- or at runtime, for one, without compromising security. There's a lot of subtle catches here that can be avoided by picking standard tooling instead of making it yourself, but doing so definitely shapes your architecture.