You are right, but it's a feature of Kubernetes actually. If you treat nodes as cattle, then it doesn't matter if there is 10 or 100 or 1000, as long as the apiserver can survive the load and upgrades don't take too long (though upgrades/maintenance can be done slowly for even days without any problems).

But all the stateful crap (like databases) gets trickier and harder the more machines you have.

Ah sorry, I completely misread. You are right, and to add another dimension even when you choose to go to the cloud you still have to hire nearly the same amount of personal to deal with those tools. I've never worked at a software company that didn't have devs specifically to deal with cloud issues and integrations.