I don't think complexity comes just from the number of tools, but the disparate things you "need" them to do. Redis, Vite, large CSS toolkits -- you're learning a bunch of large components.

I mean complexity comes from many places, but compared to the 'Unix philosophy' most of these tools are quite large. Obviously, there's quite a bit to learn about the way a *nix OS works, but if you treat tools as small and composable for simpler interfaces it helps a lot.

The web dev example of pub/sub is funny, because chances are if you're using Rails your primary DB (probably Postgres) already has a pub/sub system in or. Or you can just use any RDBMS for your job management system.