The article goes on to say it "costs Wardle a few bucks a day to host", which is an overestimate possibly by a factor of infinity, depending how he's hosting it.

As for the effort, there is none. Part of the genius of wordle is that it is zero maintenance.*

And as for the "psychological burden" do you have any evidence besides a statement made after the nyt paid him over a million dollars for it that there was any such burden? This guy has invented massively popular things before: The Button and The Place at Reddit.

For that matter, any evidence that the statement wasn't simply written by the NYT for him and a condition of his offer? In it he says it's important to him that "... as Wordle grows, it continues to provide a great experience to everyone" - that just doesn't ring true. He never showed any intention of expanding it functionally, and its expansion in terms of user base requires no action at all from him as there is no infrastructure to scale. And he knows this, of course, having developed it.

Finally, even if somehow in the absence of any maintenance effort the "psychological burden" of owning it was too much it didn't need a 7 figure knight in shining armour to save him from it. People are running clones everywhere. Any number of people would have gladly taken it off his hands.

* This is easy to verify. You can just save the page to disk, point any webserver at it and it works perfectly. No DB, no server-side logic or state of any kind.