That as well as different definitions of scale. I've done small bits of consulting work for a research company for the past four years, deploying and managing Kubernetes clusters for them as well as helping get some of the main applications up on it. This is all internal tooling, though. Their customer-facing sites are just Drupal instances running on bare EC2.

Internally, though, they wanted to self-host a chat server, Apache airflow, Overleaf for collaborative editing of research proposals, three separate Git servers, a container registry, many other things, all with extremely strict multi-tenancy isolation requirements for storage and networking because they're handling customer data and their own customers audit them for it. That was a hell of a lot easier to do with Kubernetes than trying to figure out some giant universe of barely related technologies with vastly different APIs, having to buy specialized appliances for network and storage that probably also need their own control plane software hosted somewhere else.

But if you just look at "scale" as number of http requests a particular URL gets per some unit of time, the customer-facing sites have far greater scale. If you're trying to attribute revenue, beats me. They wouldn't sell anything without the customer-facing sites, but they wouldn't have anything to sell without the internal tooling. Solo web devs get into this tunnel vision view of ops because, to them, often the web site is the product. That's not the case for most businesses.

And, of course, they'd probably just use someone else's SaaS for tooling. But if you're in a heavily regulated space where that isn't possible and you have to self-host most of your business systems, then what?