You raise a lot of wrong points to defend the article author:

> But most of the routes scrapers are hitting are e.g. computing diffs between arbitrary pairs of commits, or other computed-on-the-fly views into history.

Looks like to be wrong based on the article: Today, git.kernel.org receives about 6M daily requests demanding to see random commits.

Also, in "how bad is it", there is a bar graph of the tasks requested. And only diff can't be cached, and it is clearly not the most important one.

> batched waves from laundered residentail proxy IP addresses

Again, I don't see anywhere anything stating that there was "grouped" requests that are directly related, except in something not related to AI: The thing that usually takes us down are not scraper bots, but poorly designed CI systems that try to do something stupid like shallow-clone stable.git from 20 different nodes, all at the same time. (Shallow clones are awful. Run your own damn mirror if you're going to do something nasty like that.)

Just "waves" of requests coming from the same "residential proxy IP". But that makes sense because they might come from a same service without being a single "source" trying to scrap for training.

Let's say that I'm chatgpt, or Claude, and I have a lot of user related requests to do things based on the commits there, each one will be a different task, but they will all go through the same pipe, that would be a proxy with the residential IP if the provider notice major websites like this one blocking requests for bots.