It does handle many orders of magnitude more users than this thing does though. As a site that is the source of many hugs of death, it's serving a hell of a lot of traffic, mostly successfully.

It could serve even more traffic if it was less bloated of course.

EDIT: Some random stats from 2019 suggest that they're handling ~1000 pageviews a second on average over a month, and a view can take >100 requests to load. Combine with surge load and you're dealing with some serious requests per second.