I think it’s more that business owners love the idea of hiring half as many workers and paying them 40% more but that doesn’t make it realistic.

Larger teams and process are really about scalability and robustness, because even high achievers have bad days, can only focus on one thing at a time, etc. If you’re running that lean you have limited capacity to handle anything unusual. It’s the same reason why the only way a 10x developer exists is if you compare them to a really unqualified, poorly managed group – almost nobody works on a single well-defined problem in isolation.

You pretty much too the words out of my mouth - I was talking with someone about this just yesterday. I suspect that when interfacing with 3rd parties that are over-burdened with inefficient processes it means that he/they have to stoop to their level and dumb down their production line to work with said party.