The problem with this is people seem to have mismatched understandings of what a single system can handle. e.g. my 8 year old quad core i5 desktop with a bit of batching optimization can handle 5 digit requests per second with 15 ms p99 with some nontrivial application logic doing several joins. I don't think I've tried that same benchmark on a modern minipc, but I expect it should be similar. That's well above what most companies will ever need to handle. Visa advertises they can process ~70k tps worldwide.

Last time I interviewed I was asked about designing a system to handle 10s of thousands of events per minute, and if you thought about the problem a little you'd realize most of them didn't require real work to be done. I answered something along the lines of "you don't need to do anything special. Just normal postgres/mysql usage can handle more than that on a laptop". After I got hired I learned the rubric had some expected answers about queues (e.g. Kafka) in it. No idea why still.

Because web devs are so used to terrible design, poorly-optimized DB schemas, and networked storage latency that they have no idea what a single server (or indeed, a humdrum desktop) is capable of.

Like when I inform teams complaining of “slow queries” that the DB is executing them in sub-msec time. No idea what the rest of your stack is doing, but good luck with figuring that out - it ain’t me.

“Prove that you can apply solutions to yesterday’s problems today.” is a good strategy except in industries where today is exponentially different to yesterday.