Federated systems are more resilient, which is the half of the trade-off you leave out. Also, “scale” is too vague a term in this context. It could mean efficie

Federated systems are more resilient, which is the half of the trade-off you leave out. Also, “scale” is too vague a term in this context. It could mean efficiency or it could mean uptime. These are very different, and federated systems will have higher “uptime” in the sense that one instance crashing won’t cause all to crash. However, it will be less efficient, but there are huge efficiency gains to be had with the current design.