Yeah this is just typical techbro gaslighting. There is no rate-limit and hasn't been for years (it's just default deny), but they refuse to change the wording to reflect.
The parent's experience which mirrors my own - on a clean residential IP that hasn't sent any traffic I hit that "rate-limit" on my first request to the commits list view.
So there is no rate-limit, it's a default deny for unauthenticated requests... which could be fine but at least update the error message to reflect that.