Scalability is just a means to an end. Most often, that end is better performance. So it's pretty relevant if a non-scalable solution can deliver vastly bette

Scalability is just a means to an end. Most often, that end is better performance. So it's pretty relevant if a non-scalable solution can deliver vastly better performance in practice than a more scalable one (and this is relatively common, especially when you start taking into account things like developer cost, hardware cost, and available network bandwidth).