OP here. As others have said, it loads immediately for me (tested on desktop + on mobile data + incognito)
The entire site is cached + Cloudflare sits on top of everything. I just ran a couple performance tests under the current HN traffic (~120 concurrent visitors) and everything looks good, all loads under 1 second. The server is quite happy at an average load of 0.06 right now, not even close to start breaking a sweat.
Turns out you can get off the cloud and hit the frontpage of HN and your site will be alright.