We just all got lazy and decided to congregate around pre built platforms.

It’s not just laziness. The economies of scale can potentially be worth huge cost savings, and higher reliability, in addition to a significantly less burdensome workload to maintain. Especially for smaller sites.

I mean even when I was running my own homelab for years, the FOSS software I relied on was in many ways “pre-built platforms.” From the Linux kernel to a distro package manager (and all the maintained packages), I was always standing on the shoulder of giants anyway.