"Newest" and "best default" are not the same claim.
Guessing a machine family without a load test is how a fleet ends up permanently over-provisioned.
E2
Cost
Staging, dev, internal tooling — Meridian's default
N4
Balanced
GPS-ingestion fleet — steady, not latency-critical
C4
Max perf
Up to 192 vCPUs — not yet needed at Meridian
An engineer defaulted to c4-standard-16 for a low-traffic admin dashboard, reasoning "newest must be best." An e2-medium would have handled it at roughly a quarter of the cost.