New frameworks ship every month, and every one of them promises to make the last one look obsolete. But the systems that are still running five years later rarely used the exciting option. They used the one with documentation, a stable release history, and enough people on Stack Overflow to answer the weird questions.

A shiny stack is fun for the first sprint and expensive for the next three years. Every dependency you add is a thing someone has to upgrade, patch, and eventually explain to a developer who has never seen it before.

That does not mean never adopting anything new. It means spending your novelty budget where it actually buys something - usually one or two places in the whole system, not everywhere at once.

Postgres handles more than most teams will ever need. A queue and a cron job solve a surprising share of problems people reach for event-driven architectures to fix. Start there, and add complexity only when something measurable forces you to.