A pattern worth naming before it becomes a cliché: a wave of 2026 coverage on founders collapsing ten-tool stacks into one or two platforms, and the reason being given isn't "tool fatigue" — fatigue was always there and nobody consolidated for it alone. The actual reason is money. Capital isn't free anymore. A founder spending $4,800 a month across a stack for a 12-person team is now being asked to defend that line item the same way a CFO questions AWS spend. The 2021-era default — "buy any tool that might help, the next round will cover it" — is gone.
That's a useful frame for the broader prioritization problem. Tool sprawl and finding-sprawl are the same disease. Both happen for the same reason: each individual addition feels justified in isolation, and the cost only becomes visible once it's aggregated and someone has to defend the whole pile at once. Ten tools nobody fully uses and forty findings nobody acted on come from the identical failure to ask, before adding the eleventh thing: "what does this replace, and what does it cost to not use it?"
The fix isn't more tools to manage the tools, any more than the fix for too many findings is a longer report. It's a smaller number of decisions, made on purpose, with the unchosen alternatives written down somewhere so nobody re-litigates them next quarter.