Your concept of what is scale looks very different than mine, in my experience NFS does a very good job for in-datacenter workloads. CG rendering, oil/gas and others usually take this approach for HPC as far as I've seen. I consider this "scale". Close to 100k procs sharing the nfs is the biggest cluster I've worked at.
Of course that over longer networks it isn't suitable as the roundtrips have too much latency, other than that, is your experience much different regarding nfs?
What you consider ‘scale’ is a high watermark used by cloud providers that is irrelevant to 99.999% of the industry.
Supporting all of a Fortune 500’s business operations is very reasonable to call ‘scale’ in the normal world.
Your comment is a like a billionaire claiming that somebody that managed to hit 30 million isn’t rich.
I know there are a lot of companies that try to put some lipstick on nfs pig and call it reliable/scalable/etc. so long their clients don’t actually try to run it at scale or don’t complain too publicly when they try and can’t, they are able to get away with it.