The urban scaling theory (UST) strives for a universal taxonomy that depicts relationships among urban indicators (e.g. energy consumption, economic output) with city size. However, the lack of international agreement on city definitions and statistics complicates cross-country comparisons of urban scaling performance. Remote sensing provides a uniform standard for measuring cities around the world. To scrutinize the consistency of UST, we quantified changes in remotely sensed urban built-up areas (UBA) and nighttime lights (NTL) distributions from 11,581 cities in 61 countries spanning 2000-2020, representing urban physical elements and socioeconomic activities, respectively. We find that UBA is well described by UST in all analyzed countries, while NTL aligns with 98% of them. UST quantified by remote sensing shows greater robustness than country-dependent aggregate statistics. We also observed disparities of scaling exponents (