We got around 3m with seven guys, so yeah, and we don't even have on-call rotation / schedule, even though emergencies do happen from time to time. They think 1:1000 ratio is too big as well? That's crazy.
Are you comparing a developer platform to consumer software there? Dev platforms have radically different support costs to regular SaaS or mobile apps. Developers are really support intense.
Shouldn't developers be the most self-reliant users possible, especially when working with open-source tools? That is, shouldn't we expect that when a developer has a problem, they dive into the code and figure it out on their own?
No, generally developers prefer to request help or work around an issue than dive in and fix it. The activation energy for contributing to an upstream project is high and very few do it.
Developers are support intense because dev tools and platforms get used in a bazillion ways and combinations you can't predict. It's not like a nice consumer app where the user can only press a limited combination of buttons, and test coverage can be quite exhaustive. GUI toolkits are especially a bottomless pit of edge cases and bugs because they have tens of thousands of API methods, enormous numbers of features, they can all be used in combination, they have to run on multiple platforms usually and those platforms also have bugs etc. The support costs of a GUI toolkit are basically unbounded.
no, if I'm using your platform, it's because I really don't want to deal with the stinking pile of abstraction below that. so on the contrary, I would see it as a negative if the abstraction was that leaky.
