It’s great that they’re happy with their choices, but the choices would, in this same situation, likely saddle them with a crippled infrastructure and/or some insane bandwidth bills for suddenly pushing 100 extra TB/m.
OP, in contrast, wrote their own ad blocker targeting their own servers. They're in control of their ad blocker code and can write it to be respectful of their servers. They're not hosting the lists with the intent of allowing other people to use it, and they're unlikely to attract lazy app developers because the endpoints are (presumably) not listed publicly on the internet to anyone who wants an easy ad blocker list.
Edit: so if OP wasn’t implying that their approach was better, what was the point of posting it? Wow, obtuse much?
Edit:
OP was implying their approach was better for themselves than relying on third party servers. It’s hardly obtuse, it’s a related discussion from someone who would otherwise be impacted by the throttling.
On download.easylist.com have it shuffle and send a redirect to a mirror to download the list. I wonder if Universities are still offering these small amounts of space for Open Source projects?