Hey, author here, I think you ask a good question and I think you frame it well. I agree that, at least for some major decisions - including this one, "it is fundamentally difficult for organizations of this scale to identify and reason about valuable work."
At its core we are a platform teams building tools, often for other platform teams, that are building tools that support the developers at Figma creating the actual product experience. It is often harder to reason about what the right decisions are when you are further removed from the end user, although it also gives you great leverage. If we do our jobs right the multiplier effect of getting this platform right impacts the ability of every other engineer to do their job efficiently and effectively (many indirectly!).
You bring up good examples of why this is hard. It was certainly an alternative to say sorry we can't support etcd and helm and you will need to find other ways to work around this limitation. This was simply two more data points helping push us toward the conclusion that we were running our Compute platform on the wrong base building blocks.
While difficult to reason about, I do think its still very worth trying to do this reasoning well. It's how as a platform team we ensure we are tackling the right work to get to the best platform we can. Thats why we spent so much time making the decision to go ahead with this and part of why I thought it was an interesting topic to write about.
At its core we are a platform teams building tools, often for other platform teams, that are building tools that support the developers at Figma creating the actual product experience. It is often harder to reason about what the right decisions are when you are further removed from the end user, although it also gives you great leverage. If we do our jobs right the multiplier effect of getting this platform right impacts the ability of every other engineer to do their job efficiently and effectively (many indirectly!).
You bring up good examples of why this is hard. It was certainly an alternative to say sorry we can't support etcd and helm and you will need to find other ways to work around this limitation. This was simply two more data points helping push us toward the conclusion that we were running our Compute platform on the wrong base building blocks.
While difficult to reason about, I do think its still very worth trying to do this reasoning well. It's how as a platform team we ensure we are tackling the right work to get to the best platform we can. Thats why we spent so much time making the decision to go ahead with this and part of why I thought it was an interesting topic to write about.