What percentage of projects ever need that scale? Is it not something crazy like 95% of startups fail? A lot of the successful ones will be in niche categories as well that just don't have scale problems like major social media and tech companies.
Even then most VPS providers offer a load balancer and you can add multiple VPS. It's not so black and white on 1 server vs infinite scaling. There are midpoints.
Yes, but the second you grow beyond one server the complexity of keeping both in sync, sharding the database, etc etc etc, makes it way more simple to just write a worker and let another company handle it.