I would have posted internal slides directly from app architects or even service(-prototyping) dev teams within AWS including similar vibes regarding this discussion, but for obvious reasons that's not a good idea. But whom am I telling that ... That "reference architecture" aimed at customers using their infrastructure regarding a Wordpress installation gets the general idea across, though.

That's the result though, right? Radical internal simplicity forces incidental external complexity.

No, I'm talking about internal services that aren't directly exposed through AWS API. This represent the large majority of the internal codebase.