Archive.org is a core utility for the web to the point where Wikipedia and many other sites would collapse without it in the sense that many if not most of their outbound links would be dead forever. I’m pretty sure it would even impact the US justice system [1].

Obviously judges aren’t going to have to worry about reasonable rate limits but if these DDoSes are rare, I’d much rather they dealt with them on a case by case basis. Without some complex dynamic rate limit that scales based on available compute and demand, rate limiting would be a blunt solution that will necessarily generate false positives.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/04/wayback_machine_legit...