I think Twitter provides a case study here. The site is still working fine despite being staffed by only 20% of the employees it had just over a year ago.

I take a middle position on this having seen it all at Twitter since 2006. The site does still work, but not without outages. Of course, Twitter had major outages during the Williams/Costello/Dorsey period as well. What happened was that when Musk obtained control, the haters claimed that Twitter/X would burn down or get bricked. None of that ever happened, which leads some people to believe it "still works fine" with 20% of the former staff.

you'll have to define what "it still works fine" means then, because your description certainly would meet my definition of the phrase.

> site is still working fine

Twitter has had a lot of issues and generally failing as a company at the moment.

Yea, I think we still need to wait and see. Airplanes keep gliding when you turn the engine off. I think Twitter is still in the "Wile-E-Coyote ran off the cliff but hasn't started falling yet" phase.

It has had major outages and is losing a ton of money.

Twitter and Amazon are not similar companies and cannot be compared in terms of scale.

No one has Amazons scale.

Keeping the lights on is typically around 10% of effort at Amazon. But there’s value in the ongoing development, which is why it’s done.