The article does discuss a lot of mixed concepts. I would prefer one process polling new jobs/state and one process handling http connections/websockets. Hence no flooding the database and completely scalable from the client side. The database process pushes everything downstream via some queue while the other process/server handles those and sends them to respective clients

I used to ask all those questions to my product owner. He was so annoyed by that. Almost got fired. Companies I worked for, everything is top down. Always. I gave up asking too much

Assume you need to build a chair. You barely have seen a chair in you life. You would naturally start naively with a first approach. That will fail to carry a person at first. But as your approach advances you’ll gain experience and eventually you will build the chair after some while.

That is my understanding of what people name scrum or agile. A management harness with fancy words. The real benefit is when you let people do their work, gain experience and make them self organize their problems.