And seriously, the gaming industry is infamous for its "year round crunch mode". It can be done. Many sectors are "hard work" (ie. public sector, fundamentally non-tech gigacorps with no real in-house IT competence, etc.)

Twitter was an innovator. I remember getting into Scala party because of some open source code library from them back then, I don't know, probably around Scala 2.8.

That was absolutely unnecessary for their core business. All of this can be done in bad C++, or plain old Java 7, or whatever, for low cost, built in Bangalore.

Now that would of course likely not withstand this kind of change storm that Elon caused. But that's a different story. (Also what Elon probably doesn't understand on a technical level (but likely guessed from a business aspect), is how flexible Twitter is. In this regard he hit arrived at the right time. Twitter is fundamentally the same as it was, now it's time to innovate with it, and the architecture he found is exactly the right one for that.)