Didn’t you just need one person to say something like requiring human intervention to provision servers is not scalable? It doesn’t require an expert to think of this really.

To be fair to them, one or two servers were enough for basically every single service back in the 90s when consumers started moving to the internet. Microsoft sold what they had. Their customers bought what they were used to. The usual stack was a mainframe or an AS400 exporting a file full of records. A Windows NT PC imported the file in either Oracle or SQL Server and served HTML pages either with ASP or Java. Then export from the local db, import into the AS400. The internet facing system was a bolted on afterthought.

Of course it was still a pain compared to command line, unless you grew up with only a Windows PC or a Mac under your fingers. No CLI on Macs until Apple rebuilt the OS on Unix so you didn't even know what a CLI was.