That doesn’t answer the question at all, and I wonder if it’s actually true? A cache is not magic; it is, itself, just a static file server in the end. If I self host a static page website on an nginx box, do I actually need cache to serve today’s crawlers?

The screenshot in the image says 3k req/day. That’s 2 requests per minute (amortized). At that rate, you can serve it with cgi and Perl.

Cache is only relevant if you have a lot of traffic AND dynamic pages, or if you care about latency (which is only relevant for humans).