I can guarantee you that most systems out there could serve production traffic on an old laptop, with well-written code and lean database queries. I have done things in MySQL v3 in 2006 that should not be done with a modern database even today (a taxonomy search engine 3 levels deep. Never again).
In the age when database trips and network trips are treated as "free", we somehow arrived at MORE complicated solutions, like microservices.
A "hello, world" problem in 99% of the cases is a "hello, world" problem. At Google - it is not. It's a scale problem. Everything is a scale problem at Google first, and a business logic problem second. The FAANG alumni has convinced the new generation of developers that everything is a scale problem.
In the age when database trips and network trips are treated as "free", we somehow arrived at MORE complicated solutions, like microservices.
A "hello, world" problem in 99% of the cases is a "hello, world" problem. At Google - it is not. It's a scale problem. Everything is a scale problem at Google first, and a business logic problem second. The FAANG alumni has convinced the new generation of developers that everything is a scale problem.