You will not be able to scale anything up anyway since it’s a single instance mounting the same data.
I don't think you're wrong. StatefulSets are simply on a "higher level" than raw Deployments and manually provided PersistentVolumes/Claims. I am thinking about writing another article that shows how to use StatefulSets in similar scenarios.
Regards,
You will not be able to scale anything up anyway since it’s a single instance mounting the same data.