I get that bandwidth is expensive, but this feels a bit like the usual "make it free to get lots of users, and then start charging when everyone is locked in" plan.
If they really just want to reduce their own costs, they should be evangelizing the use of a caching proxy, and providing a super easy way for people to set one up, both on the server and client side. (Maybe they already do this; I haven't looked.)
If everybody did a fair-use of the Docker Hub maybe we wouldn't have the rate-limits in the first place? But I think we all learned that won't be happening in the open Internet.
Setting up a pull-through cache is pretty straight-forward, you can find the instructions in Docker's documentation: https://docs.docker.com/docker-hub/image-library/mirror/
Something that doesn't require me to go through 50+ container setups and manually move every one of them to use my custom proxy?