Considering all the trash that comes with heading in that direction (as has been repeatedly demonstrated by social media which has started off similarly to HN, only to turn around and shit on the people that helped them get going), I'm perfectly fine with a site that slows down a bit in special circumstances.

It's not like they can go grab employees from one of their funded companies to go work on HN, and they've clearly been happy with the results of their level of engineering investment in HN.

(Besides, as Reddit is showing, do you want your discussion site run like a tech unicorn? Arguably things were better for users in the skeleton crew days)

I always felt like scalability and growth aren't goals here, which is something I like to be honest.