It seems like your priorities are backwards. CI/CD is meant to keep your product stable, there's no point if there's no product to keep stable. DB scaffolding & proper environment config is meant to help you maintain velocity & allow for the proper dev/staging/prod pipeline for testing & scale up to meet your customer needs. But there's no velocity to maintain and no scale to meet.

Auth flows are important for enterprise customers, but just use an existing off the shelf library for oauth/SSO. Depending on your customers, this is a feature. If you mean auth flows between your own services, then you've overengineered it.

Basically none of the things you've listed are as important as having features that attract customers. Those things you build afterwards for stability and velocity.

I'm biased, but in 2026 I would just use a Ruby on Rails monolith with Postgres. You don't even need to containerize it until the stack becomes too complex to run locally.

Unfortunately only Ruby on Rails world seems to systematically care about devx and infra friction. Others just got used to throwing more money and people on it.

Did you explore any of the libraries or frameworks that are meant to bootstrap a SaaS with all of the batteries included?