[expertentipp]

But everyone wants to work on geodiversified autoscaling superclusters. It starts with watching a presentation on AWS or Azure on YouTube, or even innocent Medium article.

[uoaei]

Realistically, it starts as a byproduct of the turn toward Resume-Driven Development (RDD).

[hermitcrab]

Indeed. But a half way decent PC running halfway efficient software can generally easily process datasets with millions of rows. It is only when you get into billions of rows that you really need to start worrying about scaling.