Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, when Elon Musk took over and gutted half the staff, I distinctly remember HN full out of outrage and predicting (in hindsight, "impotently wishing" would be more accurate) doom and how Twitter will go down any day now. Then nothing happened. At least, nothing that I personally observed as a casual Twitter reader. The goalposts were moved to "it will go down with the New Year's Eve spike", and once again nothing…
it really is a testament to how well engineered Twitter is/was. I well remember Musk gloating about how the architecture was stupid and he'd fix it. Twitter would be long gone if his remarks were anywhere near the reality
Guess you don't remember the fail whale? Twitter was held together with gum and bailing wire for a long time. Yes it got better, but I'm certainly not going to use it as the example for good engineering.