Same experience here. My side project's backend is .NET 10 on Linux, in Docker on a single Hetzner box. It polls the now-playing line of ~58k internet radio stations every 20-60s and serves it as an API (tuneping.com). It's one process for all the background work (sync, polling, matching, webhooks), one for the API, and one Postgres. The thing I'd point at is the "low variance" you mention: hosted services, config and logging all work the same way, so there's very little glue code I had to invent.