What's really bothering me lately is when I push back on this and start to question "how do other teams handle this?", "what's preventing us from using the PaaS offerings?", "do you think this is a reasonable amount of software for a single engineer to be across?", I get responses from the person who built all this extra stuff that are very defensive in nature and quite dismissive of how the extra cognitive load makes me feel. What worries me is they have been with the company 8 years and given they built most of the stuff have very strong mental models of it and hence are very comfortable/competent in this little kingdom of code and in stark contrast roughly 2/3 of the team has been there a year or less and I see a lot of people struggling to be across that much software and showing fatigue from the cognitive load placed on us, and I don't think they're able to properly empathize with how it's actually affecting the team.
Anyone else been in this situation? Any advice?
Don't focus on the input variables (ie we have n engineers). Focus on the output variables. What are the SLA/Os for each service? If they're being met, then it's unlikely anything should change. Missed SLAs should trigger changes (see scaled agile framework).