I looked at using the Ory stack when they were much younger, and had some chats with their team. Ory builds everything with the expectation that you're a large enterprise, where service classes and systems are expected to be scaled. They're also pretty big k8s adopters, so they all but expect that you want to run your workloads in a large environment. Great for folks that are bringing Auth* home from Auth0/Okta, etc, as scaling for each app class is right there, but also a much more complex stack to begin with.
That said, where are you seeing 7 containers? I haven't grabbed the repo to run it, but their quickstart instructions use config overlays to manage specific configs, and none of the examples looked like more than 5 containers, 4+ your database, with 1 of them being a dev mail endpoint. Separating tasks out to 3 different services, frontend, backend, and DB migration, doesn't seem super big to me.
That said, where are you seeing 7 containers? I haven't grabbed the repo to run it, but their quickstart instructions use config overlays to manage specific configs, and none of the examples looked like more than 5 containers, 4+ your database, with 1 of them being a dev mail endpoint. Separating tasks out to 3 different services, frontend, backend, and DB migration, doesn't seem super big to me.