Something I've discovered is that if you're a small team doing something new, off the shelf products/platforms are almost certainly not optimized to your use case.

What looks like absurd scale to one team is a regular Tuesday for another, because "scale" is completely meaningless without context. We don't balk at a single machine running dozens of processes for a single web browser, we shouldn't balk at something running dozens of containers to do something that creates value somehow. And scale that up by number of devs/customers and you can see how thousands/hundreds of thousands can happen easily.

Also the cloud vendors make it easy to have these problems because it's super profitable.