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I can't bring myself to believe that an external caching layer is absolutely required to handle the load from something like a hacker news front page. WordPress with no caching I can see being taken down by 10 to 20 requests per second, but any kind of local caching should be able to handle the load easily. Does HN produce more traffic than that?

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I've been on the frontpage before and my logs indicate that the peak load was somewhere north of 350 requests/sec though the non-peak (while still on the frontpage) was typically 10-20 requests/second. That is for a very simple page consisting of an html document, css, an image, a favicon and no javascript (eg https://calpaterson.com/printers.html). If you can serve from a reverse proxy cache locally that will be fine but if some PHP/Python/NodeJS is running on each request you can run into trouble with the small servers people typically use for their side-project's website.

The one time I was involved in something on the top, I remember about 400 concurrent users according to google analytics.

Our cheap server had no problem to serve the static site.

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