Yep. If you keep off the “latest trends frameworks” and just keep it as vanilla and simple as possible web development can be productive, scalable and pleasant.
HN does that, and yet has outages and is so non performant that it can't handle when a post gets a couple thousand comments.
Not really, HN uses Postgresql, which should be fine, but it's also written in a pretty niche language. I think the argument in that an implementation in C# or Java, which is as boring as it gets in the web world, would fair much better.
Well HN is probably in the top 1% of forums
Good enough has crushed many pretenders over the decades. People would love to spin some JS microservice wizardry and lift the HN user base. Why it’s very hard if not impossible is worth multiple aha moments when considering “sustainable advantage”.