This rant misses two things that people always miss
On distributed. Qps scaling isn't the only reason and I suspect rarely the reason. It's mostly driven by availability needs.
It's also driven my organizational structure and teams. Two teams don't need to be fighting over the same server to deploy their code. So it gets broken out into services with clear api boundaries.
And ssh to servers might be fine for you. But systems and access are designed to protect the bottom tier of employees that will mess things up when they tweak things manually. And tweaking things by hand isn't reproducible when they break.
Horizontal scaling is also a huge cost savings. If you can run your application with a tiny VM most of the time and scale it up when things get hot, then you save money. If you know your service is used during business hours you can provision extra capacity during business hours and release that capacity during off hours.
On distributed. Qps scaling isn't the only reason and I suspect rarely the reason. It's mostly driven by availability needs.
It's also driven my organizational structure and teams. Two teams don't need to be fighting over the same server to deploy their code. So it gets broken out into services with clear api boundaries.
And ssh to servers might be fine for you. But systems and access are designed to protect the bottom tier of employees that will mess things up when they tweak things manually. And tweaking things by hand isn't reproducible when they break.