Amazingly stupid take. Sorry to be blunt but I'm so tired of seeing these. Every thread about WordPress on Hacker News devolves into someone who obviously doesn't work extensively with WordPress, ranting about how bad the code of WordPress is.
So this is the year 2024, and something amazing called a CDN has been invented. PHP does not get executed on every pageview, nor does a Mariadb connection get burned. If you are building a website or web application at scale with any framework or platform, a big part of your job is to architect it such that everything which can be cached, is. You may also employ tools like Varnish or transients. The underlying design principles are universal and whether you're building on top of WordPress or something else doesn't matter that much - in fact many experienced WordPress developers are accustomed to serving multiple millions or tens of millions of users per month, so the ways for making this work are pretty mature.
So this is the year 2024, and something amazing called a CDN has been invented. PHP does not get executed on every pageview, nor does a Mariadb connection get burned. If you are building a website or web application at scale with any framework or platform, a big part of your job is to architect it such that everything which can be cached, is. You may also employ tools like Varnish or transients. The underlying design principles are universal and whether you're building on top of WordPress or something else doesn't matter that much - in fact many experienced WordPress developers are accustomed to serving multiple millions or tens of millions of users per month, so the ways for making this work are pretty mature.