> its ceiling (both typical and absolute) is far lower

If you plan to remaining smaller than instagram, the ceiling is comfortably above you.

There are a myriad middle states in-between "frupid" (so frugal that it's stupid) and "Instagram scale".

Python requires much more hand-holding that many don't want to do for good reasons (I prefer to work on the product unimpeded and not feeling pride having the knowledge to babysit obsolete stacks carried by university nostalgia).

With Go, Rust, Zig, and a few others -- it's a single binary.

In this same HN thread another person said it better than me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47737151

This is a post about keeping your infrastructure simple, so Instagram is not a good ceiling to pick. People do all kinds of hacks to scale Python before they hit Instagram levels

I plan to remain smaller than two VMs

The context was explicitly single machine.