I think we’ve been conditioned to believe that any application of medium complexity requires hundreds or thousands of developers. Snarkiness aside, they have a very concrete set of functional constraints and total control over the hardware, network, and software environment. Issues like resource management, dependency conflicts, security, scale, etc are taken out of the equation, things that are often the biggest time and resource sinks.

IME, more bodies usually always equates to more bugs and slower release cycles.

According to the post these quotes are from 7 years ago... I'm sure a lot has changed since then.

NASA's software teams are also remarkably small, and manage to produce code with one of the lowest defect rates of all time. (Space shuttle code had 0 defects in 500k SLOC!)

Just goes to show: quality over quantity!

Shuttle's code quality was outstanding, but 0 defects is a myth. There are at least 3 publicly documented bugs in the Shuttle code.

https://space.stackexchange.com/a/37116