Yes, very realistic.

Search for the engineering / manager pendulum online to see various discussions on the topic.

There are lots of differences between management in a startup vs a larger or more mature company too.

Agreed. You should be able to set the waf to just drop the packets and not even bother with the overhead of a response. I think cloud flare waf calls this "block".

Where do you get the data?

Working in ISP and Managed Hosting environments made me a better engineer. Lots of unix/linux, networking, DNS, etc. Lots of support and problem solving. It all led to both a breadth and depth of experience. It's been a useful foundation for my career even after moving into other areas like swe and ml.