The problem with this sort of advice though is that everyone likes to think their project will go hyperscale, or will be prepared to if necessary. The reality i

The problem with this sort of advice though is that everyone likes to think their project will go hyperscale, or will be prepared to if necessary. The reality is that very very few of them ever need to yet so many design with this is mind not understanding the tradeoffs and what they're losing by following this approach. (Incidentally I also attribute much of the current popularity of microservices to this idea) The fact is that once you hit hyperscale you should almost certainly not be using the same codebase as when you were still establishing exactly what your project should do. For most projects, the fat models approach works really very well and I don't feel is something that people should be dissuaded from. For most projects, the alternatives are far harder to get clean results from.