Interesting your comparison with "imagine if a new user got to the page and couldn't sign up" - honestly, that's what they're faced with now regardless of closing off sign ups.
You say being able to handle the load is not an issue - I understand that on a technical level, but at the same time, you can't handle the load currently with the level of ddos attacks. That much is fact.
I know it's hard to catch these fuckers and close exploits quickly, but let's be honest here so far the methods have failed on LW's part. These are 2010 levels of downtime.
Saw that. Perhaps every community should instead defederate from lemmy.world. More server outages AGAIN today. Maybe they deserve to be attacked at this point.