Maybe. I dunno. I never seem to be working on things recently that fit into this "vast majority of apps" frame, where the right answer to up front architecture

Maybe. I dunno. I never seem to be working on things recently that fit into this "vast majority of apps" frame, where the right answer to up front architecture design is "just build it like a web app with a transactional database that scales with number of users". You're probably right that this is what the vast majority of projects look like, but it isn't very useful information when you aren't working on this kind of project.