The first ten years of my career, I worked with distributed systems built on this stack: C++, Oracle, Unix (and to some extent, MFC and Qt). There were hundreds of instances of dozens of different type of processes (we would now call these microservices) connected via TCP links, running on hundreds of servers. I seldom found this exhausting.
The second ten years of my career, I worked with (and continue to work on) much more simpler systems, but the stack looks like this: React/Angular/Vue.js, Node.js/SpringBoot, MongoDB/MySQL/PostGreSQL, ElasticSearch, Redis, AWS (about a dozen services right here), Docker, Kubenetes. _This_ is exhausting.
When you spend so much time wrangling a zoo of commercial products, each with its own API and often own vocabulary for what should be industry standards (think TCP/IP, ANSI, ECMA, SQL), and being constantly obsoleted by competing "latest" products, that you don't have enough time to focus on code, then yes, it can be exhausting.
You know what? This is a really great point. When I reflect back on my career experience (at companies like Expedia, eBay, Zillow, etc.) the best distributed systems experience I had was at companies that standardized on languages and frameworks and drew a pretty strong boundary around those choices.
It wasn't that you technically couldn't choose another stack for a project, but to do so you had to justify the cost/benefit with hard data, and the data almost never bore out more benefit than cost.
The second ten years of my career, I worked with (and continue to work on) much more simpler systems, but the stack looks like this: React/Angular/Vue.js, Node.js/SpringBoot, MongoDB/MySQL/PostGreSQL, ElasticSearch, Redis, AWS (about a dozen services right here), Docker, Kubenetes. _This_ is exhausting.
When you spend so much time wrangling a zoo of commercial products, each with its own API and often own vocabulary for what should be industry standards (think TCP/IP, ANSI, ECMA, SQL), and being constantly obsoleted by competing "latest" products, that you don't have enough time to focus on code, then yes, it can be exhausting.