4 applicants x 5-10 hours is .5 to 1 full time employees. Very generously speaking the ask here is for 100k/yr in free labor. The stringent interview process is going to be very limiting on potential candidates.

The experience isn't going to be a learning experience since you're looking for people that already know it all and I wouldn't even put it on a resume, it just advertises to employers you're ok being lowballed.

Perhaps this is a necessity for an instance of this size, but to me that seems to indicate that lemmy.world has reached the upper end of reasonable scalability, which given the workings of the fediverse would be fine.

Ansible/Teraform are portable. I don't see it's usage as a failing, rather as avoiding DO lock in.

Agreed with the rest though. This is quite the ask.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/tags will have up to date information

it's the popular one on grafana.com - https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/1860-node-exporter-full/