[landhar]

But since it looks like the proxy fleet is made of a large set of nodes and each one of them only keeps track of their own state, if sourcehut were to only keep one counter for the whole user-agent it would lead to a large number of nodes not being able to refresh their cache for potentially long periods of time (there's nothing that would guarantee for example that it's always a new node that gets to make the one request per hour).

That's precisely why it's so unfair to ask the sourcehut team to try to come up with a solution to this problem: it's the very design of the proxy that Google put together that is causing this issue in the first place. And the sourcehut team has no control over their design. And to add insult to injury: when the sourcehut team offers recommendations on how to improve their implementation, Google responds with "it's too much work".

[TeMPOraL]

And to add a cherry on top, the only reason a single user-agent counter is even a possibility to discuss is because Drew made the Go team put a unique user-agent on the proxy in the early stage of this issue report.