It's not intentional. We actually held back more complicated features for years to make it easy to self-host (e.g. only used Postgres and Redis as data stores for a long time).
The complication really just comes from the new capabilities we've added, and the dependencies that come with that. I suppose also our sophistication in hosting the platform has evolved (as the scale has increased), and so the tooling we use to manage it has become more complicated.
Kudos! And I get it, it's hard to do really cool and powerful things when large amounts of data are involved without involving better (and possibly more complicated) data stores.
The complication really just comes from the new capabilities we've added, and the dependencies that come with that. I suppose also our sophistication in hosting the platform has evolved (as the scale has increased), and so the tooling we use to manage it has become more complicated.