"scale up" is usually used as a counter-argument to a solution that is perfectly fitted to the scale it is supposed to be used. This is nothing but a salesmen argument.
It is not only in the Forth community that one hears disaster stories like: we did the software for client X in 3 weeks with a team of 4 programmers, but after a few decades they lost the know-how of our language so they decided to rewrite in a "modern" language that "can scale". They hired a team of 40 developers, it took 3 years, and the result is less reliable than the original. The only thing that scaled up were the development and maintenance costs and the only thing that was modernized is HR policy (i.e. let's hire disposable developers).
It is not only in the Forth community that one hears disaster stories like: we did the software for client X in 3 weeks with a team of 4 programmers, but after a few decades they lost the know-how of our language so they decided to rewrite in a "modern" language that "can scale". They hired a team of 40 developers, it took 3 years, and the result is less reliable than the original. The only thing that scaled up were the development and maintenance costs and the only thing that was modernized is HR policy (i.e. let's hire disposable developers).