

That’s not at all what I meant. Coordination of people is value added too, that totally counts into working hours.
The other reason is, the more employees, the easier it is to get shitty unethical stuff done
That’s the main spirit of what I tried to express. The more people to keep employed, the more ideas you need to justify your existence to the shareholders. The 300 devs aren’t adding new features, aren’t making your app faster, smaller, safer. The last 20 updates with “bugs fixed” in change logs? These bugs were bugs in A/B tests they are running on your device. They aren’t adding any end-user facing value to the app or experience. They are adding new way of tracking, updating existing A/B tests for new remotely controlled flags, adding new A/B tests.
They are squeezing the profit margin from you. You’re paying for it AND are the product.

Any reason to stick to large SD cards? I have a really good experience running a cluster of rpis on USB nvme disks. I got cheap USB 3 nvme pockets and post-market/post-lease nvme disks. 4 rpis have been running like that for more than 3 years now. They boot in about 1 second, don’t have any spikes in energy usage and I don’t worry about writing or reading too much from them. Average read/write time is under 2ms.