I got a response from a co-founder and CTO of Discourse. Cool

Sure, everyone has a threshold for how much traffic is an attack. For easily cached traffic like this, maybe I'd start wondering about it at 10k QPS? 100k? If you think the threshold should be 0-1 QPS, fine

But how do you reconcile this with the other founder's opinion  that engineers who produce 75% of the performance of an all-time-great performance team are "brutally bad", "terrible at their jobs", and deserve to lose their jobs?

https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/065/633/224/370/913/original/ead2b9cd9eea03a9.png