It's fake work until your web application reaches a point where server loads take your web API down, and endpoints frequently take well over 10 seconds to respond.
Yes, I worked at a place where both of those things were true.
Switching some services out to a service (in this case, Azure functions) saved my company like $10k/mo, too.
This is a fine point. And yet both FB and Twitter managed to go through long period of servers being overloaded and fail-prone, to the point of frequent outages - cue the Fail Whale[1] - relatively unscathed, and emerge victorious.
In the end it's about taking calculated risks, and concentrating on where your effort and capital are most effective.
Virtually nobody thinks of the Fail Whale as a real risk now a day.
Yes, I worked at a place where both of those things were true.
Switching some services out to a service (in this case, Azure functions) saved my company like $10k/mo, too.