I feel the article vastly underestimates the difficulties associated with scaling to Instagram's size at buyout and the time it takes for developers to come to terms with and accommodate that. The first 80% of Instagram is the app and sharing, the next 20% of building the network out is where all the value was created and the majority of development time was invested.

The founders described it as "replacing all the components of a car while driving it at 100mph", and even having worked on projects orders of magnitude smaller (albeit with a considerably more complex datamodel) I can't say I disagree.