Monkeys have no salary and no rights. It's more scalable and easier to manage than regular employees.

Get a lot of monkeys and put them at work. They will produce something. Better have something than have nothing.

That's a bit like trying to use Apple ][ machines for cloud business.

Although your simile is reductio ad absurdum, a version of this idea does, occasionally get surfaced, in the form of using (modern) small, lower-power processors (e.g. Atom, mobile ARM) in very large numbers in the datacenter.

While touting the purchase cost or energy benefits, these ideas routinely ignore the overhead cost inherent in a distributed system, let alone the Fallacies [1], which is the GP's and OC's (and possibly your) point, I believe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_compu...