Honestly this isn't even close to true. It's can seem that way if all you look at is startups that fail fairly early on but the vast majority of startups that grow beyond the early prototype stage end up rewriting the app using solid engineering principles or they fold under the load. That requires people who really know what they are doing. Is it easier to prototype an app now? Certainly. Is it easier to build a scalable stable app now? No, not really at all. It's not breaking new ground anymore but it certainly requires a great deal of experience and hard earned knowledge to get there.
>. Is it easier to build a scalable stable app now? No, not really at all.
What? It's vastly easier. 10 years ago, you'd often buy servers. Getting a HA DB required a bit of knowledge (especially if you weren't using SQL Server's easy cluster stuff). Backups were another hassle.
Now? Click "New Database" and select a performance and HA level. Done. Look at StackExchange - they just scaled the DB up cause RAM is cheap enough to put a TB in a server. That's vastly easier than dealing with scaling out. And even to scale out, "cloud" DBs like SQL Azure have sharding and auto-scale built-in.
On top of that, servers are MUCH faster. Look at the RPS that some sites are claiming. They simply aren't that high. 1000 RPS? 10 years ago that required some planning. Now, so long you don't do dumb things, it's not an issue. (Source: I ran a system that did hundreds of millions of transactions a day, and the hardware requirements were rather light. Each transaction ended up in an ACID DB UPDATE, in addition to archival, auditing, HTTP requests, etc.)
It's simply incorrect to say it's not easier to scale today. It is.
