I work for a WordPress agency. This is mostly due to poor optimization of the website owner/host. It's almost never worth it to have a fully dynamic page genera

I work for a WordPress agency. This is mostly due to poor optimization of the website owner/host. It's almost never worth it to have a fully dynamic page generated for every visit. A couple short lived caches (60 seconds) would likely have kept the site online, as well as properly set headers. This honestly seems like a rookie configuration mistake that was overlooked during some migration between webhosts. At this point, tuning WordPress is pretty well known. The reason MySQL gets blamed is due to WP's poor DB schema. Very few indexes and the data is not normalized. On small sites with few comments/posts, it's never a problem, but at scale, you'll see issues start to popup as the DB has to scan entire tables for each page load. This largely drove the rise of comment services like Disqus and FB comments a decade ago. It seems in recent years a lot of people have opted to just not have blog comments, instead driving discussion to dedicated forums or social media groups.