> What do you mean why should we X? Because that's what everyone does, because otherwise our employers will not find it cool here and leave, etc

Welcome to modern startups where the goal is to build an engineering playground and not to solve a business problem.

> Hire for boring maintenance

From a candidate's perspective, being stuck with a boring stack makes them less employable in the long run unless every company does this, which is not happening (see first point).

In addition, "boring" people typically cost more than those who chase the new shiny all the time and might settle for less money to work on "exciting" tech.

Finally, again as I said above, in a lot of cases especially in tech startups, IT has stopped being a solution to a business problem and started being a goal itself. Instead of doing the bare minimum to solve the business problem at hand, they build an overcomplicated engineering playground to justify hiring tons of people and being able to brag about solving their (self-inflicted) problems at the next AWS conference, which then helps hiring more suckers in who constantly chase the latest hype.

Furthermore, "boring maintenance" means there is a successful, profitable product that you merely need to maintain. That's not the case for most tech startups where the approach is "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" and profit is nowhere to be seen, nor is it a true objective (the objective is to either get bought out or get that next round of VC money so you can prolong your status as a founder of an exciting an innovative startup). In this case, there is nothing to maintain, you always build and rebuild from scratch.

> Many are happy to do just that

Maybe, but I'd argue they would require more money to stay in place compared to hiring people who are happy to take lower pay to work on shiny stuff. I guess most software engineers' goal is to accumulate experience in all kinds of hyped up technologies and then capitalize on that at a FAANG or similar - merely solving business problems with boring tech doesn't give you that option, so you'd have to ask for more salary to compensate.

Whether an engineering playground costs more than a "boring" stack maintained by well-paid people is a different question, but so far most companies don't bother doing the math, especially when it's startups that play with VC money they don't particularly care about.

> Sometimes they throw at you some shitty challenge

They do so because they can get away with it. You can decline. They'll have to change once everyone declines and they can't hire anyone, but as above they won't change as long as they have enough suckers that are happy to go through this.

> nobody seems to hire for potential these days

These days in tech startups you don't need long-term potential. You want to extract the maximum value now so you can "grow" and get that next round of VC money or get bought out by a bigger fish. A lot of these are outright not viable and will fold as soon as the money runs out and no bigger fish comes along, so in this case trading future potential for current results makes sense, because the company may no longer be here to capitalize on that future potential.