alt Hacker NewsFrameworks do matter in the sense that a good, well-organized, well-thought out framework will always outperform a shabby one. And the throughput matters. But having said that - it's a fine balance.
We moved one of our customers from a vanilla wordpress backend (gotta be the shittiest code organization I've ever seen) to a custom Phoenix/Elixir based backend that handles over 500M+ requests at 1/3rd the cost of competitors and 40% cheaper than their old Wordpress backend. So yeah, it really does affect the bottom line.
The problem with the OP article is that it’s a tiny toy:
> “Three tables: Publisher -> Author -> Book. Seeded with 4,215 real books from the Open Library API: Agatha Christie, Dostoevsky, Penguin Books, real data with real-world cardinality.”
What “real-world” application is that tiny? You could keep this all in RAM on a machine with say 16 MB or so of RAM (not GB!) A Raspberry Pi would be overkill.
The lesson from the article is, a framework doesn’t matter if your scale is below the mom-and-pop shop level.