Oh, absolutely. I think in terms of making people think about putting things in-process in RAM and being a bit more imaginative at looking at machines sizes as worth exploring is a good thing, and the article is interesting as a look at what you can do.

Many things can plausibly fit on a single machine irrespective of uptake (e.g. I worked on a system not long ago where even if we cornered the entire global market and the market expanded several magnitudes in size, our entire working set would still fit comfortable in memory).

But even when you need to scale, it absolutely can scale better if you're willing to not automatically resort to a standard database stack for everything for example.

Twitter used to (not sure how much did that idiot fck it up) be quite great from this perspective from what I gathered. They had technical blog posts and are even featured in the famous data intensive book as an example for many scaling problems. Sure, they didn’t write it in assembly but instead use Java/Scala with Graal, but architecturally they had a sound system (plus what people routinely forget, the system should handle the general load, but it worths nothing if it fails at peaks, and twitter can easily hit a billion daily users during big global events)z

Fixed timestamp: https://youtu.be/LjFM8vw3pbU?t=1613