how do you handle real-time notifications at scale, dont you need some kind of special tech for that?

Hey everyone, I'm trying to figure out the best way to handle real-time notifications for our users, especially since we're getting so many. We're noticing things are getting slower and sometimes messages aren't getting through as our user count goes up. We thought about WebSockets, but managing all those connections seems like it could get complicated. Has anyone else found good ways or tools to scale real-time notifications that aren't just basic WebSockets? What did you find were the downsides to the different methods you tried?