Mining stale low-difficulty blocks as a DoS attack

A DoS attack vector against a bitcoin node I haven't really seen mentioned anywhere is mining a stale chain in a low-difficulty era (say right after the genesis block), ideally with a lot of expensive operations like signature checks.

This answer mentions that in Bitcoin Core only blocks with "a chance to be part of the best chain are actually downloaded and stored", how exactly is that chance quantified? And how do other node implementations deal with this attack vector?



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