1) Scaling doesn't really require more work. It needs a bigger investment because a hardware hypervisor costs significantly more than a vm... after all, that hard metal can host tens of VMs

2) you still need to manage your linux system and OS if you're buying a VM... the only thing you don't need to worry about is hardware. So, a faulty hard drive, hypervisor failover and similar stuff is taken care of. That doesn't mean that it works, however. It just means that somebody else will take care of it... though it might not work and you're entirely on their mercy to fix it

3) containers don't inherently give you better scaling either. creating images from VMs has been done for ages before docker was a thing, and provisioning a new Node from a VM Image is pretty easy if you're already using Terraform or similar.

you're just able to utilize a higher percentage of your hardware with containers, as you don't need to virtualize the kernel... so its a cost-cutting issue, not scaling