We've been having this problem way before the cloud was even a thing...

It's true the cloud has somehow made that problem worse but it's been a problem for a long while, way before the cloud was a thing.

I've seen so many times the following cases in the different places I worked at:
- pv/vg/lv created many years ago on SAN and being migrated as the underlying servers and SAN bays are refreshed, lv's being increased as time goes on
- lv's which start small (because "we" don't know or didn't expect the growth or for how long this stupid app would survive)

Eventually there comes a point where:
- you're resizing a FS just to create inodes not because you need free space
- your resized FS doesn't have all the fancy bits and features of a recent FS of the same type (xattr/acl becoming enabled by default by mkfs on ext comes to mind, meaning older ext fs wouldn't have them if you didn't have the options in your fstab)
- you hit some magical limit which prevents you from resizing
- the underlying hardware has changed meaning the magical parameters used during creation no longer apply
- ...

Yes, the problem comes from the fact it's easier to do all that rather than to start from freshly created FS' and to sync data to them but the bottom line is it's been an issue for a while.

I mean I even had the issue with UFS filesystems on Solaris back in the day where growfs couldn't do its magic if the initial system was too small.

One could argue tools should just refuse to do what is being asked of them when the end result is just too different from a regular FS (or add a --i-really-know-what-im-doing flag)...

A different but similar problem was with ESX where if you had less than 3GB of RAM on your VM, you couldn't hot add RAM to got past 3GB (or was it a Linux problem, can't remember?). Or VM hardware types not being upgraded as hypervisors are being upgraded. Etc.