There's two options that could have been taken here. 1. On hosts that don't support cron, tell users to use an external service to do it, and in the meantime t

There's two options that could have been taken here. 1. On hosts that don't support cron, tell users to use an external service to do it, and in the meantime their scheduled posts and other functionality breaks. 2. Implement a workaround like this. Yes, it's not the greatest solution, but the point is that it works. In addition, "every single page that is rendered also checks if it should fire off a cron job" is incorrect. A lock is used to avoid running more often than once per minute. If you're at the sort of load where this is an issue, you should be running proper cron anyway.