my guy, you literally made me laugh. how's this https://stackexchange.com/performance different from any so called workloads large organizations are running. you've your app servers, db servers, load balancers and failover servers. pretty standard setup. yet SO is running on bare-metal. resume driven development and everyone thinking they're google | fb has killed and made money in our industry
StackExchange is largely a CRUD app. High volume of tiny requests that hit the app layer, then the database, and back. Other organizations have lower volumes of compute-intensive requests, async tasks, etc.
With respect to the size of an organization, the cost of coordinating deployments and maintenance over a handful of servers grows with the size of the organization. It frequently behooves larger organizations to allow dev teams to operate their own services.
None of this is to say that there isn't waste or poor decisions throughout our industry; only that it's not the sole factor and SO's isn't the ideal architecture for all applications.
