Well, WhatsApp was started by industry experts in scaling. If you're making a point about functional programming, I'd tend to agree but from a business perspective I'd look to why Netflix still uses AWS: https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Netflix-still-use-AWS
I think people tend to forget how often WhatsApp experienced outages in the early days.
This actually speaks volumes. Yes, people forget. Yes, it’s possible to suffer severe growing pains and still get acquired for $$$$. No, you don’t need to start with everything-AWS to ensure 99.9-whatever% uptime. People forget.
An $1B acquisition may have nothing to do with any colossal infrastructure. Was it indeed colossal?