This may very well be the first time that Cocoa Pods was told that they're consuming a huge amount of resources. They might not have even known that what they're doing is considered abuse.

hard for me to believe no one was ever curious enough to do the math

People are starting to get used to the idea that you hit someones api and they scale for you. I mean from a company based on scaling that's strange but there's a lot of 'magic' that goes into a lot of providers being able to always respond to an API call and most don't see it.

Based on just looking at how some of my employer's customers use our service, plenty of them are completely clueless that they're well outside of normal usage patterns.

I think the parent was expressing the project owners' thought, "we could do this, why not," and not saying they agreed with it.

You're assuming that people are willing to defer gratification today in order to ensure long-term sustainability. To illustrate why this might be a problematic assumption, I would point to all of human history.

pjc50's question was rhetorical, and was offering a critique of the "sharing economy" mindset. That it should be pretty obvious is exactly the point.

OT (from primary discussion): This isn't the sharing economy. This is someone abusing a resource.