[dalyons]

To your first point I find in these discussions the “just buy a bigger server” crowd massively underestimate the operational problems with giant db servers. They are no fun to babysit, and change gets really hard and tedious to not accidentally bring the whole thing down. It becomes a massive drain on the velocity and agility of the business.

[baobun]

Giant sharded DB clusters aren't that much more fun or less precarious... Ever run Cassandra or Clickhouse at scale?

IME vertically scaled replicas/hot-stand-bys are a lot more stable to operate if your requirements allow you to get away with it. OtoH you better already be prepared if/when you hit scaling limits.