I think one of the reasons behind PornHub's tech stack is that their industry doesn't really lend itself to VC, so building an engineering playground for PH would be a waste of money as no amount of complexity would net them VC money (nor an invite to a cloud provider conference), where as most startups live and die based on the VC funding their complexity and buzzwords allow them to grift.

I think the takeaway was that choice of language might be less important than engineering strategy, because PH are successful despite their choice of stack :)