I don't know about your projects, but I'm my case most (all) of them doesn't really need any kind of scale. Hell, this blog has a tiny 5$ DO machine and is still happily serving traffic from HN. I do understand not all projects are small blog instances, though :)
I guess in my case I prefer to just keep it simple and see how far I go with that setup than spending time working on making the perfectly-scalable project that is never serving more than 2 requests per second. If it ever grows, I will need to work to make it scale, sure, but on the other hand that is a good problem to have.
Anyway, I understand this is pretty subjective and depends on how you think about your projects and your requirements, so I do understand there will be people both in agreement and disagreement.