You're making OP's main point. He's arguing that (to use his numbers) 90-95% of startups don't actually need to worry about that. Hell, I would argue that a lot of services at established companies don't actually need to worry about it (and the ones that do, need to worry about it a lot). Tons of stuff inside of $megacorps is running on crummy "non-scalable" architectures because somebody sat down and did the "engineering" part of "software engineering" and went "y'know, I think all we're really ever need is..."
>Cloud is still better for early stage startups
My preference is cloud these days (especially if I'm just quick and dirty clicking buttons in console rather than CDK-ing things together). However, there are still lots of cases where sinning up a $10 droplet and running `docker compose` completely satisfies "the architecture" part of the business.