I was afraid people would abandon good runs if too long, so started spawning 4 and 8 sometimes to speed it up somewhat. (There's 180-odd entries participating in the compo, so even 10 minutes of play time per entry is a huge commitment for people looking to vote on most / all games.)
Re: Subscribe popup: this is the sole reason I'm looking to migrate from Hashnode! All of their UX "improvements" are egregious, but this one surely takes the cake. I very much agree with your sentiment.
When I joined, it was a nice technical writing-oriented site, but these days it has entirely succumbed to terrible product managers. E.g. their blog post editor's main function is seemingly to upsell their generative AI wrapper.