This is nonsense. It's always easier to destroy than to build/mantain. If you got any real advice, by all means...

To be clear, they did “damage” was to our bottom line. Most sites don’t capacity plan for random cliff walls of 2-10x traffic (clearly we should!). We’re scalable enough to handle that traffic after a period, but a) it caused intermittent periods of low availability (costing us money because we didn’t generate income the way we normally do) and b) cost us money from scaling all our services up.

It’s just selfish. If you’re going to take the product of other people’s work in a manner they don’t consent to, at least do it in a way that doesn’t cost them twice over.