I recently moved my site[0] from WordPress to Netlify
Used HUGO and then one of my Post regarding MacBook Thermals was trending on HN, The site had more than 12K visitors. If I had been using WordPress I could only imagine how catastrophic that would be. Though I crossed their 100GB limit. But since this was a rare spike in traffic I feel their free plan is very generous. Netlify+ static site generators is good alternative for WordPress.
[0] https://bsid.io
With proper caching even a $5 DO droplet would be easily able to handle this load. With caching + cdn you should be able to handle virtually any load. I personally run cloudfront in front of all of my WP sites, even the low traffic ones because the costs are negligible.
I agree that DO would handle the load. The con is that it costs 5$+tax. Where as netlify is free and CDN and caching is taken care by netlify. Saves time
