> they're not limiting access to the site or (intentionally) throttling newcomers

They can simply throttle access for everyone to a push/merge frequency which was normal for human-maintained projects.

They should look at how MMOs battle cheating/botting and apply similar countermeasures (it's actually quite absurd that MMOs which are actively attacked every minute have a better uptimes than Github, and on Github the problems are even self-inflicted, not caused by external attacks).

But of course throttling bots to human-level push/merge frequency wouldn't be compatible with the Github leadership's 'AI bullishness'.