Doing cowboy shit to run your infrastructure on junk is fun and cool and interesting, it makes for a great story, but ultimately the software people I trust and admire the most are the ones who value reproducibility, security, isolation and reliability. This can be a serious profession! Mechanical engineers may romanticize the days of slide rules and estimation handbooks and good-enough safety factors with whatever steel the local foundry put out, but when push comes to shove I want a bridge made by someone who ran a computer model that verifies every assumption and tracks every bolt, I want finite element analysis, I want modern techniques, x-ray metallurgy, design inspections, high reliability, proven margins!
I am not a software engineer, I'm barely a programmer, but when I have to build something for other people, I try to make it trustworthy. Margaret Hamilton called it "Software Engineering" because she built reliable, error-resistant, robust systems, her entire thing was about making software reliable on potentially flawed or limited hardware. We can play with our toys but when actual reliability is needed, we build software that can recover from crashes, update itself in place, catch errors, migrate between hosts, and gracefully handle power outages.
Virtual machines are good, containers are good, vlans are good, stateful firewalls are good, proxies and loadbalancers and software layers are good, more abstraction, more indirection, run your workloads as WASM binaries in continent-spanning Kubernetes clusters, oversubscribe your memory and CPU's, failover your storage hosts, be free from the shackles of unreliable, vulnerable, sloppy, independent hardware, lean into the glorious world of instant migrations, reliable storage, real-time replication, require quorum on operations, let nodes fence nodes that act suspiciously, build reliable, serious tools people can rely on, don't settle for the risk of data corruption and lost transactions, and ensure that your noisy neighbours will be kept apart by the high walls of virtualization and cryptographic security.