> What exactly is it about GitHub's workload that makes us feel like the specific 23k things happening in that slice of one second are tantamount to insanity?
    >
    > Technically speaking, this rate of things happening per second is well within the territory *of what one large server can handle*

...for real?

Just as a mental exercise, consider what is happening when a GH action kicks off and everything involved in that.

The amount of write I/O we're talking about here is absolutely massive just on the GH side of it.

A Netflix or Hulu serving videos isn't the same thing because that is a read-heavy workload that works great in CDNs. GitHub has massive amounts of write volume.