Having made the front page more a few times, the value is really minimal. Yes, I've made sales from HN traffic, but not that much in the grand scheme of things.

But the value from all the links SEO wise was more valuable. If you make the front page normally people are going to post you in other places, translate it, or something else, which increases your SEO.

The hug of death isn't that large. I had a 5 euro DigitalOcean droplet running Nuxt, which handled 30k visitors in a single day without CloudFlare caching it. So if you have a decent setup you should be good.