Hot take: Scalable systems come at a cost compared to traditional approaches if scale is simply not reached

What I mean here is a non scalable architecture can still be scaled by abstracting into dedicated services later on (by ensuring observability is maintained). Your application could have scaled much better on an EC2/Azure VM had it been on Golang than TypeScript from the start.

Not everything needs to be pure microservices. Serverless puts this into an even more expensive mess.

We already saw it with Prime Video going to monolithic structure for their video processing.