Still, what's the benefit of that? If peak load is a concern, a push-based system can stagger out individual post deliveries just as well, and push gives the producer much more control over load management. If that's not enough, several posts can be combined too.

In a pull system, you are at the mercy of your consumers' refresh rate setting, and for infrequent producers, you'll have lots of wasted cycles fetching nothing new on top of that.

I do agree that pull is simpler to implement (since subscription management is handled entirely on the consumer side, requiring no network protocol and server-side state for it), but in terms of network calls, it's strictly worse.