You can find posts from people who were hosting their own single user instance that went down because of a popular post that got federated across multiple instances.

That doesn't give confidence to the typical self-hosting Mastodon user who goes 'viral' somehow. So they should expect that if they were to have a post to go viral across instances they have to become a sys-admin for the day to bring it back and scale it up to handle the traffic.

No wonder normal users are not self-hosting their own instances to fully own and self-verify themselves on Mastodon and have to search for an instance to re-centralize to.

That is very disappointing and not a great sell for Mastodon so-called 'verification', but not at all surprising.