Expensify aren't really scaling SQLite in the way that people would expect. To say it's scaling SQLite is not exactly wrong, but probably gives the wrong impression. The users of their database likely wouldn't see it as SQLite, and they don't use the stock SQLite code.
They have their own layer on top that happens to use SQLite as the storage format on disk[1]. This layer means they aren't using full SQLite at the application level, but rather using their custom database in the application, and SQLite within their custom database.
Further, they've customised the SQLite codebase as far as I can tell to remove much of the functionality that SQLite uses to ensure that multiple instances can safely edit the same file on disk together, then they memory map the file and just have many threads all sharing the same data.
[1]: FoundationDB also does this, and scales to thousands of nodes. The trick is that it's essentially _many_ separate, very simple SQLite databases, each being run independently.
