I sure do. As a small web hosting provider AtlantaWebHost.com it was one of our proudest moments when our FreeBSD servers handled the Slackdot effect without complaint. This was the Pentium 3 Dell PowerEdge server era.
I am no longer affiliated with AtlantaWebHost.com. The company was bought in 2005 and is still running as a boutique provider.
To this day, I'm still pretty handy with crimping ethernet cables :-) I mostly just do it in my own home and homes of friends if asked for help.
Yes, but at that time serving the Slashdot amount of traffic was actually a challenge when using standard setup. (Not impossible, you just needed to put in extra effort) These days unless you're doing something silly you should be able to handle HN front page from a raspberry pi at home.
No, connections better than ADSL can handle the traffic on network side and as long as you're not serving huge content. And as long as you're not doing per-user content generation, your throughout is a question of "how fast can nginx serve memory cache over network". The original RPi B can do 40 rps serving a 180kB file. RPi4 can do 4k rps (https://ibug.io/blog/2019/09/raspberry-pi-4-review-benchmark...).
So surviving front page on HN for a blog post served from home connection should be trivial unless you disabled caching somewhere.
For Daring Fireball, it's called Fireballed. Jon Gruber (used to?) keeps a cached version of linked pages to put up in case linking to them in a new post causes them to go down.
Does anyone remember when this was called the Slashdot effect? Being Slashdotted.