I’ve always thought it’s good practice for a system to declare its limits upfront. That feels more honest than promising ”infinity” but then failing to scale in practice. Prematurely designing for infinity can also cause over-engineering—like using quicksort on an array of four elements.
Scale isn’t a binary choice between “off” and “infinity.” It’s a continuum we navigate with small, deliberate, and often painful steps—not a single, massive, upfront investment.
That said, I agree the ZOI is a valuable guideline for abstraction, though less so for implementation.