The problem is that it's to easy to imagine that things are more work than they really are. I've worked on a few things that from the outside and after the fact seem like they would have involved a lot of people, when in fact it was just a few of the right people doing something that they knew how to do and even then barely made it happen.
Imagine a project that needs a cutting edge front end programmer, a backend web programmer, an embedded programmer, a scalability and reliability engineer, a product manager, a marketer, a designer, QA, etc... imagine how hard it would be to make decisions and keep them under wraps! ... But for some unreproducible reason, this time there's a single person that can perform each of these roles.
Can it happen quietly? Well duh...