Yet, for some reason, I see this repeated everywhere, always. Does it make the people who repeat it feel better? Are they actually informing anyone of anything? Who knows.
Granted, I'm sure the average engineer will be very relieved to find out they're paramount to production.
This is actually pretty apparent if you camp a web forum. People seem to either need a raspberry pi or a data center: this is the typical web-app vs mmorpg divide amongst possible computational fantasies people have. Questioning what motives people have is very sensible.
It's worth repeating, if only to raise awareness among devs that modern computers are _extremely_ fast. You can start a new one with commodity hardware and it will probably serve your needs for the lifetime of the project. If your project gets so popular/successful that you need more than a single machine, then I would hope by that point you know how to move it onto a cluster of machines, or into the cloud if the economics make sense.
I say "most web projects" because it's true - most web projects are simple CRUD apps in slightly different forms. Sure, there are some up-and-comers using AI to burn half a data center to produce fake comments and images for internet forums. Those won't run on a Pi or single mini PC. But people are making _so_ many web apps that will never see more than a few hundred or thousand users. Those don't need multi-instance load-balanced highly-available infinite-scaling systems to serve their users needs. That usually just adds cost and complexity until you're at a point where you _really_ need it.
Go grab a similar server from Hetzner or something.