Hey buddy, I understand you're frustrated, but I just want to make a few points:
- I have personally seen many instance admins and Lemmy contributors note many times over the past weeks that Lemmy is unoptimized and not ready for the current traffic
- I have myself mentioned it several times in announcements to users of my own Lemmy instance
- Lemmy maintainers have asked for help with optimization in several channels
- Lemmy maintainers are clearly working hard at fixing Lemmy issues and improving performance - just look at the work that went into 0.18 - the fact that it's far from perfect is clear to everybody, but progress is constantly being made
- Lemmy maintainers have mentioned multiple times that their inboxes are full of notifications and DMs - it's not that they're brushing anything under the rug, it's just that they're not physically able to keep up with the volume of communication that is being thrown at them
I really believe that you have some useful insights and can be very helpful for Lemmy, but I'm afraid that if you take this accusatory tone and blame people for not doing enough then that will overshadow anything helpful that you're actually saying.
Having said all that, if you would like to take a look at some stats about queries on lemm.ee (a Lemmy instance with 4k users - definitely much smaller than lemmy.ml), I have put together a spreadsheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSPpqM6QCZYAAvnWe8p-xxN553ukRIquHw71j3nB763x7TNeqeUO-Oss51yPC7zVaT2x4jll39NCeMu/pubhtml#