I glanced at the two links you shared and I wouldn't call those architectures boring, in fact they're quite involved. "I personally can't even answer with confidence what a single reasonably fat server can handle" - this is too ambiguous of a question anyway, since it depends on the workload. HN still runs on a single server, for instance.

The good news is you should stop worrying about this stuff, and just build. You'll eventually run into bottlenecks and can address them then. That's how best learning happens anyways. Premature optimization is fun and intellectually stimulating, but rarely gets you closer to delivering value.

My rules of thumb for starting out:

  - Start with a monolith (microservices are great for certain problems, but it's very unlikely you'll have those problems in the beginning, and they add quite a bit of complexity)

  - Use a relational DB (same caveats as above for NoSQL, RDBMS can handle search well enough early on as well)

  - Use managed services as much as possible (cloud > managing your own hardware, RDS > managing your Postgres instance, etc). They typically have sensible defaults, provide greater security/scalability/availability, and let you focus on the product.

  - The fewer independent moving parts in your architecture and infrastructure, the better. Let the complexity add over time, as needed.

Laravel can let you start very small and still get you very far. You can easily start with a single server running both the app and the db, and then add specialized servers for higher performance cache and queues later on by simply changing the configuration.

I think you can learn a basic LAMP/LEMP stack in a few hours or days. You can spin one up on bare metal or a VM using XAMPP or similar, then connect it to various other layers like a DNS provider, Varnish or redis, a commercial CDN, etc. That shows you the basic functionality of each part of the system and how they connect, without the overlying complexity of containers and such.

You can replace each part of it as you need to (like using postgres instead of MySQL or Ruby or Python instead of PHP).

This definitely can't hyperscale, but it's how small and medium websites all used to be made. Good way to learn by doing if that works for you.

I strongly recommend this overview of what "software architecture" actually includes by Kevlin Henney.

It's long, but extremely useful. It is full of wisdom.

https://youtu.be/aCK-Pu80EEs?si=e7a6ssIaNJy2VTfk

Simplicity is ... hard, so hard that the whole industry favor make things complicated for the job security reason.

Give me your interpretation of what does "microservice" mean, then i could give you more clear context.

https://github.com/madd86/awesome-system-design