Could not disagree more. If you are a startup that is struggling to survive, it is an absolute waste of resources to overengineer your app for potential scale. It's the VC way to burn all of the money hiring talented infra engineers to manage this, but it is not pragmatic at all. The exception is if your startup is literally a high volume data processing platform or something similar.
That simple PHP/MySQL or rails monolith will scale much further than you think by throwing more servers at it without having to hire an army of devops engineers. Solving problems you don't currently have when your company is not profitable is a waste of money.
That simple PHP/MySQL or rails monolith will scale much further than you think by throwing more servers at it without having to hire an army of devops engineers. Solving problems you don't currently have when your company is not profitable is a waste of money.