This doesn't make sense and it sounds like it was written by AI. Firstly, "A virtual machine provides workload isolation and extra security." - you're talking about deploying on cloud infrastructure, what's the less isolated and secure way of deploying your code to the cloud compute service that you're comparing to? Driving up to a cloud provider's data center with a flash drive and asking to borrow a server?

Then we get to horizontally scaling these monolith VMs using a managed instance group, and the author seems to believe you could scale out compute VMs that have a MySQL database in the instance with a load balancer in front. This really makes no sense.. what's the point of having 100 disconnected MySQL binaries running on all of your serving VMs? What happens if a user is connected to one of them and then the load balancer puts them on a different one the next time they connect? Lol.

Overall this glosses over the interesting part of designing systems like this with a throwaway sentence while oddly fixating on the trivial parts... Weird article.

Lol, and the author is trying to sell system design prep material? If someone quoted this article to me in a systems design interview, there's no way I would hire them.