[bsvalley]

You can't say "always". This doesn't make sense either because it's on a case by case basis. You could have a simple product used by billions of people, which doesn't require many devs, or you could have a complicated infrastructure no one knows about that gets billions of requests from 10 other products per day. This could be handled by an army of engineers.

Is your hot product in a maintenance mode? If so, just a few devs can handle it.

Then you have companies with groups like retail, legal, hardware, etc. They require tones of software engineers to build internal tools. They definitely don't reach billions of users and you see a lot of these teams. What I found out while working at some of the Faang's is that the hottest teams are usually very lean. You'd be surprised how one single rock star engineer can handle. When you start having +10k engineers in your company, only a minority of folks will end up working on the hot stuff.