With sufficient time, I like to think they could refactor and find a way to stay in the free range for most users and offer a paid upgrade to those exceeding it or else put them in request cooldown periodically.

Does anyone know if the apps typically do server side caching on hot threads so they can serve slightly stale but probably accurate results? Can you employ background service workers in the app so that data fetching can be distributed among all users, whether active or not? Like, could I, the user, give the app permissions to be promiscuous in its api calls on my behalf so that it could cache data that's beneficial to all of the app's users whether I would use the response data or not?

Again, the problem is certainly one of sufficient notice and general fuckery on the part of reddit admins, but in strictly an engineering sense, this appears to be a challenge, not a showstopper. I don't blame any devs who have had enough of the nonsense and pull the plug, but I would hate for some of the smaller app developers who are not facing multimillion dollar fees to throw in the towel if there are ways to make things work. Maybe the bigger apps like Apollo and RiF could open source their projects for the benefit of those willing to try to keep the baby and throw out the bathwater.