You ignore the weight of requests and general situation of this project. This is not your average mommy-blog whose does not care much how many downtimes it has. This is a website with illegal content, under constant attack, with a some pretty dynamic content on top and likely the main goal to satisfy their community. So most of their budget will go to security and redundancy, to protect themselves and allowing a high uptime.
Where you can use 1 server, they will need to have something around 20 servers. Where you can use a cheap VPS provider, they must use an expensive shady provider who will take the heat of legal attacks. And so on and on... because of their situation they have a bunch more requirements which eat their budget than your average website, leading to a rather heavy, complex and thus expensive architecture.
Surely there is still room for optimization, but it seems this is a rather new redesign from scratch(?), so not details need time.
Where you can use 1 server, they will need to have something around 20 servers. Where you can use a cheap VPS provider, they must use an expensive shady provider who will take the heat of legal attacks. And so on and on... because of their situation they have a bunch more requirements which eat their budget than your average website, leading to a rather heavy, complex and thus expensive architecture.
Surely there is still room for optimization, but it seems this is a rather new redesign from scratch(?), so not details need time.