I think scale in recent times just becomes a buzz word people can say when things just not working, yet in my opinion this word have much bigger meaning. Scale can be used when the software is just not scalable, for example if 1,000 users access a website, and the website becomes unusable, the website is not scalable. And yet, people use it for a lot of other stuff. Lets take for example the Javascript language. In my experience Javascript is not scalable in the terms of developer numbers. Javascript is usually working good when a single developer is working on each component, and no integration is needed. This is happening usually because of the non-strict behaviour of the language. Those kind of behaviour caused language like Typescript to market them self as "Javascript that scales"