I know it's a different problem but presumably there's at least some relationship/order of magnitude being expressed here...oh well

> It would take a very very large number of crawler bots to force open 10k connections, I suspect.

You can do that with any system made in the past 15, maybe 20 years.

From the wikipedia page:

"As of 2025, the problem has long since been solved, with the number of possible connections to a single computer being in the millions."