The 1 + 1 setup can make it up even on FAANG level, it's not more about how much a single machine can do but more about how i you organize teams and what kind of swe you want ... bigger companies want "fungible" like SWEs, and it's easier to swap a swe in a microservices architecture vs monoliths.
It’s easier swapping an engineer into a module associated with a well-architected monolith than swapping them into a microservice. Given a monolith uses function calls that are fast and don’t fail when the network cable is unplugged or DNS gets misconfigured, it’s arguably a lot easier. There are fewer failure modes and overall lower complexity. No circuit breakers, back offs, retries, etc.
