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> The only lesson to learn from this is that given exceptional resources and a long list of talent any stack can be made to scale.

Exactly. IIRC, Facebook itself is/was a giant ball of PHP, and they had to do all kinds of crazy things to make it scale, up to and including writing their own compilers and VMs.

That doesn't say anything about the suitability of the scalability of stock PHP.

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I think the lesson is, avoid rewrites and don’t break apart your monorepo; have teams improve the platform while your product engineers go full-steam ahead. Compare with Twitter which spent 2 years in the woods rewriting to Java while FB kept growing, giant ball of PHP and all.

You’re getting downvoted for this, but you’re not wrong.

Just keep moving forward unless the sky is falling is 100% the lesson to be learned here.

In the worst case, you'll fail to scale due to technical shortcomings like Friendster and become forgotten while later entrants like Facebook eat your lunch.

There was a time when "being web scale" was a real concern. That's one reason companies like Google make such a big deal about it in their technical interviews. Now most of the hard work has been done and exposed as services so today even an untrained teenager can stand up a web-scale service.

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