New technology is fun. Production systems are not supposed to be fun.
A business application earns its keep by being available, understandable and changeable for a long time. That makes boring technology surprisingly attractive.
Mature does not mean obsolete
A mature technology has usually accumulated the things that are hardest to see in a comparison table: documentation, debugging knowledge, security processes, libraries, migration paths, and people who know how it behaves when it goes wrong at three in the morning.
That is operational value, and it is real even though it does not appear on a feature list.
There is a large difference between technology that has stopped evolving and technology that has stopped needing to reinvent itself every eighteen months.
Every dependency is a future conversation
Adding a library can save days of work. It can also become tomorrow's abandoned dependency, security advisory or upgrade blocker.
That is not an argument for writing everything yourself. Reinventing cryptography, authentication or a database abstraction because dependencies feel risky would be considerably worse than the problem.
It is an argument for asking whether a dependency solves enough of a problem to justify becoming part of the system's future.
The résumé is not the architecture
Technology choices are sometimes driven by what somebody wants to learn. That is entirely reasonable on a personal project. Customers should not unknowingly fund it in production.
A new framework may genuinely solve a problem better. If it does, there should be a reason that can be explained without mentioning conference talks or repository stars.
"Everyone is using it" is not an architecture decision.
Innovation belongs where it buys something
We are not against new technology. New tools are valuable when they materially improve capability, reliability, development speed or operating cost.
The useful distinction is where the experiment happens. Trying an unfamiliar build tool is very different from making an immature database the only copy of a customer's financial history.
The blast radius should set the appetite for novelty.
Boring systems age better
A system built from common components, ordinary protocols and well-understood patterns is easier for the next engineer to inherit. That matters, because business software routinely outlives its original assumptions and occasionally its original developers.
Predictability is not glamorous. It is an excellent property for software somebody intends to depend on.