Well, an "average" HN user may use something like a load testing tool such as https://github.com/loadimpact/k6 https://github.com/loadimpact/k6 or at least rent

Well, an "average" HN user may use something like a load testing tool such as https://github.com/loadimpact/k6 https://github.com/loadimpact/k6 or at least rent a few VMs with 10Gbps links for a few hours and use wrk/ab so I would not be so sure about (a). Edit: oh, and then they might dust off that Kali Linux VM lying around somewhere...