While I definitely respect seizing the snark opportunity.. I feel like I see loads of websites crash from HN / Reddit hug of death regardless of architecture, so I don't think I would necessarily consider this a failure of the architecture
It is hard to imagine any reason as to why a normal site/blog couldn't cope with this.
Now since whatever solution you pick is going to be an overengineered mess it's easy to understand each in isolation, most of us don't have the time/energy to optimize for this. And that is fine!
But it is kinda sad that the quick and easy approach is not a statically generated site. There is absolutely no reason why that should be any harder.
Yet for some reason we don't value that.
And we do value it when downtime loses us business, something that's not likely to apply to our personal blogs.
Maybe Wordpress should enable some low-risk caching by default, but maybe it's not worth it since most installs never get traffic and caching is confusing especially to the non-tech-savvy.