@zachleat I would think with session reuse you wouldn't pay that TLS connection cost constantly. Also I imagine OpenSSL/BoringSSL has improved in the last seven years, and more cryptographic operations are done in CPU now then back then.
That said I don't think I'd run anything without a caching server in front anymore, unless it was very server interactive and would miss constantly. Varnish did amazing things at Flywheel.