I get where you are coming from. For me, being a long-term employee having gone through a few transitions from smallish to biggish, and when your storage guy you hired doesn't really know networking basics, or the database administrator has no clue about Linux, etc. it tends to slow everyone down.
"Scale" often seems to equate with SF hotshots from one of the big names that will come in and airdrop a brand new architecture. These things take years and you need those generalists that have the tribal knowledge and the ability to jump in (almost) as deeply as a specialized developer, DBA, Network Admin, etc. I think the SRE movement is good evidence of the type of breadth and depth needed to operate a complicated system at scale.
IMO that's a problem of hiring the wrong specialists, or BS artists in specialist hats (see the article's point about "the tech industry is not serious about hiring" :) ).
In other words, we have to go to war with the army we have, not the army we'd like to have. Sometimes waiting for just the right fit isn't an option, either because of the need to keep adding heads for growth, and sometimes you have situations like a Director (just brought in from BigDealCo to lead the growth) has a former employee that knows is "perfect" for the job. Director leaves after a year, after installing people that don't have skills. Catch-22 sometimes.
"Scale" often seems to equate with SF hotshots from one of the big names that will come in and airdrop a brand new architecture. These things take years and you need those generalists that have the tribal knowledge and the ability to jump in (almost) as deeply as a specialized developer, DBA, Network Admin, etc. I think the SRE movement is good evidence of the type of breadth and depth needed to operate a complicated system at scale.