It's actually sad to see that scale-up almost disappeared, especially considering the insanelly powerful HW we have now, just NVMe SSDs are game changer for anything I/O bound. I remember how few years back there were some people in our company completely floored when they learned that StackOverflow ran on 1 SQL server (quite beefy though, 1TB RAM IIRC). Similar 'cloud' (aka 'someone else's datacenter') setup would cost significantly more, but that seems to be forgotten/forbidden knowledge these days. I guess people need to justify those cloud technologies certificates.

Yes, exactly. I don't want to call it the 'new' generation but many have seem to forgotten how efficient systems can be if you build them properly.

I haven't seen any certificates that replace sweat and hard work yet, except in organizations where they cannot keep track of individual developer performance and simply count certificates.