What is funny is I had spent more than half of my career working in the SEO space building "efficient," "high-scale," "single server" web applications, because people don't want to have to hire teams of people to manage all the different "-ops" that go along with the modern, micro-service, distributed architecture that is unnecessary 90% of the time.

All of those quotes were because they are all relative terms. Like high-scale meaning 10,000s of concurrent users; and single server for the web app (separate database server, or utilities server for cron jobs, offline processing, etc); and efficient meaning nothing really.