So, since you seem to have some knowledge here, what would you suggest a single engineer trying to make a somewhat scalable multiplayer game? Either instanced with <64 players or a more larger user count.

I did some experimenting with rolling my own networking layer in c++ and it was a lot of work, and tried to do it through unity but it seems to require quite a large investment in time to understand how networking fits in the overall picture of the game. But maybe I'm looking for magic where it does not or can not exist :)