It probably wasn't intentionally selfish. Just really short-sighted, which isn't uncommon. Sometimes it takes a while for things to penetrate for anybody. Alloy's later comments seem much more productive. Whether that's because of backlash, he reread the earlier comment and realized how it seemed, or just had some time to think about the imposition on Github, at least it looks like CocoaPods is going to reconsider how they handle their distribution.
It's hard to see the difference between selfish behavior and short-sighted behavior because they're often confounded. What I got from this is that Alloy will consider the deep vs shallow deep copying Git issue, but wants to continue using Git and GitHub as a CDN for a massive user base, and doesn't want to re-architect because developers are expensive and time is limited.
The Git deep v. shallow issue just puts a band-aid on the CPU problem, but it doesn't do anything about the terabytes of bandwidth per week (it'll be worse), and it won't do anything about GitHub's claim that Git is not meant to be used as a CDN and doesn't scale well.
They've become a big project that warrants thinking about revenue or organization strategy, but they're delaying it by externalizing their costs. Cases like these can pressure GitHub into rethinking the leniency of their policies.
I also think that if you're in the top-5 resource consuming group, more sympathy would go your direction if you were a paying customer, but they've indicated no interest.
