Honestly, I think it was probably a few users abusing the system like crazy. I've been building with Gemini CLI the past few days and had an increasing amount of issues getting a request through.

The GH issue trackers were full of people bitching and moaning about it. I think it might be a worse thing to alienate your users who use your product in the intended way - through Google's tooling.

But I agree the 0 strike rule seems really excessive.

It is also a possible scenario that a single individual sets up 10+ AI Pro subscriptions to blast through tokens like crazy - not sure how the economics of the daily allowances compare to the API pricing here.