Keep in mind that your Hetzner instance has locally-attached storage and a real CPU as opposed to networked storage and a slice of a CPU, so I'm not surprised a

Keep in mind that your Hetzner instance has locally-attached storage and a real CPU as opposed to networked storage and a slice of a CPU, so I'm not surprised at all that this beats an AWS setup even on the more expensive instances. Yes, frameworks can be a problem (although including WP in the list is an insult to other, actually decent frameworks), but I would bet good money if they moved their setup to a Hetzner setup it would still fly. Non-optimal ORM calls can be optimized manually without necessarily dropping the framework altogether.