I still have to find a name for this disease, but it’s somewhat like “you’re neither Google nor Netflix”.
Everything has to be Scalable™ even if a raspberry pi could serve 200 times your highest load.
I’m currently involved with a “micro service system”, that has very clear, legal requirements, so we know exactly, how much load to expect. At most, a few thousand users, never more than 100 working at the same time on very simple business objects. Complex business logic, but technically almost trivial. But we have to use a super distributed architecture for scalability…
I’m guessing you already got an answer for that though when you asked about it.
Could be either “oh you’re right let’s not do that”, or “because we want to design for horizontal scalability rather than vertical in case the demand grows later”, or “the client has requested and it’s paying for this feature” and so on.