The serverless-versus-hosting cost debate is usually too shallow. The real tradeoff is not serverless versus servers, it is utilization efficiency versus economies of scale. Serverless makes waste visible as usage; hosting hides it as idle capacity. The cheapest system is the one whose cost model matches the shape of the workload and the maturity of the team operating it.

Long-running branches feel productive for the developer who opens them, but the cost lands on everyone else through delayed integration, hidden assumptions, and uncertainty that surfaces right before a release. Trunk-based development is less a trend than the natural consequence of taking CI/CD seriously.