Using wild heavy-duty (or faux-heavy-duty but just as hard to manage) solutions where 2-3 colo'd servers running boring services + Cloudflare would do is so well-accepted as normal practice in Startup Land that it's not worth fighting. Just take the free résumé sugar and don't rock the boat. You won't get anywhere anyway, and on the off chance you do win all you're doing is ensuring that you, personally, are to blame for any problems that come up. Meanwhile the costs and problems of Kafka and Kubernetes and all that jazz are no-one's fault, because that's "industry standard".
[EDIT] in fact it's pretty much the norm outside startup land, too, as soon is you're involved with any kind of bigco "innovation" or greenfield-development division.
[EDIT] in fact it's pretty much the norm outside startup land, too, as soon is you're involved with any kind of bigco "innovation" or greenfield-development division.