Facebook is actually a good counterexample to the claim that language choice doesn't matter. PHP's execution overhead was significant enough that Facebook developed HipHop, a PHP-to-C++ compiler, which reduced their average CPU consumption by around 50%. They subsequently developed HHVM and Hack to address further performance and maintainability issues.
That doesn't mean PHP prevented Facebook from scaling, just as C# didn't inherently prevent Orkut from scaling. But being able to scale an application and being able to scale it efficiently are different things. You can compensate for language and runtime inefficiencies with more hardware and better architecture, but that doesn't make those inefficiencies irrelevant.
C# would arguably have given Facebook a better starting point in terms of execution performance and static typing than PHP, but claiming they could have run the original application unchanged today is a bit of a stretch. Facebook's architecture, infrastructure and requirements have evolved enormously, regardless of language.
That doesn't mean PHP prevented Facebook from scaling, just as C# didn't inherently prevent Orkut from scaling. But being able to scale an application and being able to scale it efficiently are different things. You can compensate for language and runtime inefficiencies with more hardware and better architecture, but that doesn't make those inefficiencies irrelevant.
C# would arguably have given Facebook a better starting point in terms of execution performance and static typing than PHP, but claiming they could have run the original application unchanged today is a bit of a stretch. Facebook's architecture, infrastructure and requirements have evolved enormously, regardless of language.