I'm a newly minted head of analytics who transitioned from a different domain, so I never had to muck my way through the MDS but attentively watched others from the sidelines over the last few years. Best I can tell, "the modern data stack" is just a marketing phrase invented by a cadre of vampire vendors. The lessons I learned watching others translated into a few simple requirements for our nascent "stack" that most importantly include transparent pricing I can reason about and divvy up, as many integrations as possible so I can minimize rolling my own, and a straightforward framework for ETL code. These three requirements plainly disqualify most of the MDS universe.
With the benefit of starting basically from scratch and not having to mess around with real-time analytics, it's pretty easy to ignore the MDS vendors. So far I've landed on BigQuery, AirByte, GitHub, BI Engine, Looker Studio, and Pandas 2.x or DuckDB for local stuff. I send as many things as possible straight to BQ, lock junior analysts out of gigantic tables, archive periodically to partitioned parquet files in cold storage, use mostly turnkey integrations, and ruthlessly prioritize custom ETL jobs. Putting GitHub in the mix isn't super ergonomic and we may be in the market for new tools once we cross the "big data" frontier, but that'll be a while from now. I'll probably never know or care what the MDS vendors think I'm missing.
With the benefit of starting basically from scratch and not having to mess around with real-time analytics, it's pretty easy to ignore the MDS vendors. So far I've landed on BigQuery, AirByte, GitHub, BI Engine, Looker Studio, and Pandas 2.x or DuckDB for local stuff. I send as many things as possible straight to BQ, lock junior analysts out of gigantic tables, archive periodically to partitioned parquet files in cold storage, use mostly turnkey integrations, and ruthlessly prioritize custom ETL jobs. Putting GitHub in the mix isn't super ergonomic and we may be in the market for new tools once we cross the "big data" frontier, but that'll be a while from now. I'll probably never know or care what the MDS vendors think I'm missing.