> Have you worked the other way before? Where you have ssh access to machines (lots of them, when you need to do something big) that have all of your secrets, can talk to all of your dbs, and you can just compile + rsync binaries on to them to debug/repro/repair?

A lot of the problems I enjoy solving specifically relate to consistently minimizing privilege, not from a security perspective (though there are obvious upsides to this), but from a debugging/clarity perspective. If you have a relatively small and statically verifiable set of (networked) dependencies, and minimize which resources which containers can access, reasoning about the system as a whole becomes a lot easier.

I can think of lots of cases where I've witnessed good outcomes from moving towards more fine-grained resource access, and very few cases where life has gotten better by saying "everyone has access to everything".