We spent six months and four engineers building an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) using Backstage to reduce cognitive load. Three months after launch, 80% of our engineering team had abandoned it, reverting to old CLI tools and tribal knowledge. We failed because we confused a *developer portal* with a *developer platform*, and we forced engineers to manage hundreds of lines of YAML just to get a GitHub repo. Here is how we dismantled the monolith and built what they actually wanted.