I'm not at all sure alibaba or tencent would actually want to DDOS LWN or any other popular website.

They may face less reputational damage than say Google or OpenAI would but I expect LWN has Chinese readers who would look dimly on this sort of thing. Some of those readers probably work for Alibaba and Tencent.

I'm not necessarily saying they wouldn't do it if there was some incentive to do so but I don't see the upside for them.