There's no need to go truly production grade initially. I run some projects in production on single node deployments (with Nomad, Vault, and Consul all on one node, i.e. bootstrap_expect = 1) and it's solid. The hardware specs required are no different than if you were to just use systemd to run everything.

The beauty with HashiStack is you don't need to go fully monty. There's also no need to use ACLs which I agree adds a lot of unnecessary complexity if you're only at the MVP phase or doing things solo/in a small team. And you can run everything on a Digital Ocean $10/mo droplet -- it's very lightweight. I even have one HashiStack deployed on a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant and other ancillary wares and it works great. But there's always the path to building a proper cluster if you need the redundancy.

I'm very bullish on HashiCorp. They can do a much better job though of communicating that not every deployment needs to be enterprise-grade and offer better ways of bootstrapping the type of cluster that fits your needs. I think a lot of that messaging gets lost due to their ongoing war with Kubernetes and what large companies are looking for.