I'd argue that tech stacks are unimportant 99% of the time. It really doesn't matter if you use Java or PHP or Python or Node.
Failures that I have seen due to the choice of tech stack include:
- Technologies that your team doesn't know well
- Technologies where hiring is difficult (I've seen attempts to turn C# devs into F# devs and Java devs into Clojure devs and productivity suffered)
- Choosing the flavor of the week, whether that's the hottest Javascript framework or newest NoSQL database
- Over-architecting thinking you were Google-scale with the added complexity hurting velocity (it doesn't matter if you can scale to millions of users if you can't get there)
Generally boring tech stacks work. By the time your Ruby/MySQL monolith has performance issues, hopefully you're successful enough that you can scale out the worst performing parts in some other language/datastore combination. You'll be in a better position to fix performance problems are when you have them rather then when you are trying to predict them up front.