100% agreed, it can hand a few hundred thousand hits a day. Obviously not okay for HN scale - but it's what my personal site and a bunch of side projects use.
[0]: https://secure.php.net/manual/en/sqlite3.exec.php#usernotes
= 3.47 hits / s
"Insert time / record" = ~50 ms (according to the internet)
= 50 ms / s locked time.
So I'm guessing not. Even if at peak he was seeing 10x traffic, you'd only expect short delays from the database.