I just realized that this got reposted, so just getting to these comments.

I guess its clear this implementation is quite garbage and doesn't scale - I'm using Apollo GraphQL and polling for updates which is probably overloading the backend. Seems like the pages/content will not even load for many of y'all. Issues might also be from my Google Cloud Platform setup.. Will investigate tonight.

Really sorry to have wasted some of your time :(

Thanks to all giving feedback anyways!

UPDATE: Now thinking my MongoDB Atlas cluster was the problem. Did not expect many (or any) visits/requests, so I was still at the free tier which only allowed 500 connections at a time. Just upgraded so I'm hoping this solves some problems..