Sounds impressive until you realize that there’s 86400 seconds in a day and so even if majority of those happen during business hours thats still firmly under 200 qps per server. On modern hw that’s very small. Also what instance size?
The language/runtime certainly has an impact. But indeed, in reality there is no way to compare these scaling claims. For all we know people are talking about serving a http-level cache without even hitting the runtime.
This is trivial with epoll(7) or io_uring(7). What you are describing "5 ec2 instances" could likely be attributed to language and/or framework bloat but hard to know for certain without details.
Raw php scripts, no ORM either. It has very good abstractions for some logic and for some other parts it is just a spaghetti function. Changing anything is difficult and critical so we are not able to refactor much.
