With 100K users and a minimum cooldown time of 5 minutes, there's 100K tiles per 5 minutes would be an upper limit. Only bots would hit that 5 minute cooldown every single time, and bots make up a very small minority of the users. They even point out later in the article that they only peaked at 200 updates per second.

> For example, designing with an average of a million requests per day in mind would probably fail, since you get most of that traffic during daytime and far more less at the nightly hours.

That depends. If you're talking about a public website, then yes. But this is just a single API endpoint with a very fixed time-based rate limit.