This isn't accurate at all.

Standard operating procedure for large-scale scraping is to use a botnet, it's a sybil attack where you can have tens or even hundreds of thousands of IPs ticking away at 10 requests per minute or some such. Done correctly, it's nearly impossible to detect which nodes are complicit from their access patterns or user agents.

That said, rate limits work relatively poorly against this. A proof of work approach like HashCash might work though.

That said, someone mentioned that the login page alone involves 11 MB of data transfer, so maybe that is the problem they are confronted with.

Could it be that they just stop paying bills for Akrose and they shut down their service?

Needless to say, if true, this would be extremely funny.

My guess is he got rate limited himself after a few hours as a verified user so he’s already upping it

Well, at least he's engaged over a holiday weekend.

If it was my company, this would be a fifteen meetings, a six-month series of sprints, and we still would only decide on a new color for the icon.