This take on "building blocks of modern computing" is fairly opinionated though.
They mention "NGINX, SQLite, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Linux kernel, etc." - of which I'd only consider NGINX and the Linux kernel (and Redis) as "building blocks". The others might be part of their own preferred stack, but if you mention Postgres, why not MySQL? If Kafka, why not RabbitMQ?
But yeah, NGINX, Redis, and the Linux kernel are basically outside of discussion.
They are all arbitrary (including nginx) in the sense that there are many stacks out there that don't use any of them. But I don't think it's a controversial selection as they are all extremely popular.
They mention "NGINX, SQLite, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Linux kernel, etc." - of which I'd only consider NGINX and the Linux kernel (and Redis) as "building blocks". The others might be part of their own preferred stack, but if you mention Postgres, why not MySQL? If Kafka, why not RabbitMQ?
But yeah, NGINX, Redis, and the Linux kernel are basically outside of discussion.