Funny, but honestly, a single dedicated server should easily be able to handle a million users, for most CRUD apps.
This. I'm now seeing many younger developers with no exposure at all to hardware servers, only underpowered cloud VMs.
Not sure how to solve this, but I certainly enourage everyone to spend time now and then benchmarking cloud setup vs. local hardware to at least understand the performance spread and cost tradeoffs you're making.
I've seen too many setups paying 4 and even 5 digit US$ monthly bills to AWS, for workloads that could have been served off a single $1000 box without it breaking a sweat.