The point is more that the time involved to set up the scalable architectures in the first place - load balancer, app cluster / containerization, deployment aut

The point is more that the time involved to set up the scalable architectures in the first place - load balancer, app cluster / containerization, deployment automation, database replication etc. - might be better spent just doing some simple optimizations on a single VM first. A lot of people jump straight to big distributed architectures with 1/1000th the traffic to justify them.