Start-ups that don't need to scale will quickly go away, because how else are you going to make a profit?

How have you been going since 2005 and still not understand the economics of software?

CPUs are ~300x more powerful and storage offers ~10,000x more IOPS than 2005 hardware. More efficient server code exists today. You can scale very far on one server. If you were bootstrapping a startup, you could probably plan to use a pair of gaming PCs until at least the first 1-10M users.

Just to make it clear: There are a million use cases that don't involve scaling fast.

For example B2B businesses where you have very few but extremely high value customers for specialized use cases.

Another one is building bully hardware. Your software infrastructure does not need to grow any faster than your shop floor is building it.

Whether you want to call that a "startup" is up for debate (and mostly semanticist if you ask me) but at one point they were all a zero employee company and needed to survive their first 5 years.

In general you won't find their products on the app store.

It's disappointing to see how tone deaf some users like yourself are. Such a immature way to speak.