Yes obviously the barrier to entry is high. But nobody knows for the big servers either since they are basically just small instances that happened to get big. Thats why lemmy.fmhy.ml just died one day due to domain seizure. End of the day all you can do is look at how long a server has been around and if it has be online a reasonable amount of time. That kind of reputation just increases slowly and nobody can make it happen faster.
Has anyone ever actually benchmarked vm.page-cluster = 0? Makes no sense to me to suggest a cpu is so bottlenecked that disabling read-ahead would actually help. If anything it would mitigate the decompression time if it guessed correctly as the work would already be done if left at the default of 3. Normally cpu is not bound when using zram because its quite low cpu anyway.