[patsplat]

First off, keep in mind that even scaling a broadcast publication can be complex. Sure one can bolt on fastly or s3 but cache invalidation is never a simple problem.

Next "power users" as others put it are not a single set of editors. It's more of a social network with multiple levels of trust. The idea of a wiki is that all users have write access, even if those changes are moderated to have different levels of latency.

Of course there are ways to engineer the system, but at that point one is, well, engineering a system. And WMF is doing so on a shoestring compared to other comparable levels of traffic.

Is WMF creating new paradigms of computing? Probably not. But they are doing a good job, IMHO.