Greed. There's no technical basis. I am pretty sure they considered it and even though L2s do not pay much rent to L1, Stripe wanted absolute control (which goes against decentralization) and all the fees in their pocket. Just hoping this doesn't become another trend.
Absolutely, I worked on tech behemoths and smaller companies. The dev experience was significantly better when all development was local. I even worked on initiatives to move development away from the cloud, and although other devs were skeptical, they ended up loving it.
I worked on this team for 3 years along the OGs behind BMQ, specifically on a closed-source middleware with very similar architecture. I am very happy that they finally open sourced one of their main projects!
They have very strict standards which are necessary given that C++ really is a minefield. We did a great job avoiding UB by following those coding standards. There is some verbosity that can be avoided but hey these are details.
Personally, I have moved to Rust since then and I am not looking back.
There are no "special" persons or superheroes. It is all about time + money.
If a tech giant wants this to happen - e.g. because memory un-safety is mostly the root of all evil - they can use people from the current team and throw a few millions on hiring new talent.
I don't know about that. Local shop price gauged me but Amazon refunded 100% me for each and every return I initiated (even when it was my mistake and I threw away the packaging).