I think that's the author's point: the industry tends to act as if complex, scalable architectures are inevitable if you have a useful service or want a viable business.
You can get a lot of mileage out of essentially any backend technology running on recent-ish hardware, provided the devs know what they're doing.
> Our backend today is more sophisticated but our philosophy to scaling is simple, avoiding premature optimization.
I think the main success is that they have succeeded in glorifying their work in this dimension. He'll probably tell it for 20 years. "You won't believe it dude but i was just using google sheets. Can you believe it dude?"
So 60k per hour is 1k per minute is 16 per second. That is... not that much? Certainly not really blog post material.