I don't disagree; but I think the cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP) have sort of shielded people from how cheap/powerful the underlying hardware has became.
For ~100eur/month on hertzner you can get a 16core Zen3, 128GB RAM with 8TB of NVMe SSD.
Unless your stack is horrendously badly optimised you can serve SO MUCH traffic off that - definitely billions of postgres records without breaking a sweat.
So the scale argument somewhat disappears - if anything, people end up adding much more complexity to the product to get round the high hardware costs of the cloud (complex caching systems for example, instead of just throwing loads of hardware at the problem).
For ~100eur/month on hertzner you can get a 16core Zen3, 128GB RAM with 8TB of NVMe SSD.
Unless your stack is horrendously badly optimised you can serve SO MUCH traffic off that - definitely billions of postgres records without breaking a sweat.
So the scale argument somewhat disappears - if anything, people end up adding much more complexity to the product to get round the high hardware costs of the cloud (complex caching systems for example, instead of just throwing loads of hardware at the problem).