"It needs people to remember that "public" means PUBLIC and implement basic damn rate limiting if they can't handle the traffic."

And publish the acceptable rate.

But anyone who has ever been blocked for sending a _single_ HTTP request with the "wrong" user-agent string knows that the issue website operators are worried about is not necessarily rate (behaviour). Website operators routinely believe there is no such thing as a well-behaved bot. Thus they disregard behaviour and only focus on identity. If their crude heuristics with high probability of false positives suggest "bot" as the identity then their decision is to block, irrespective of behaviour, and ignore any possibility the heuristics may have failed. Operators routinely make (incorrect) assumptions about intent based on identity not behaviour.