He definitely was referring to the CocoaPods team when he used the word "personal," not their users.
If CocoaPod was run by a business that was charging those millions of developers for their services, it would be reasonable to expect that business to pay for a real CDN.
They're not, so that's not a reasonable expectation. But it's no more reasonable to make these demands of GitHub. Giving out a free product doesn't mean that you're required to give it out unconditionally, or in unlimited amounts, or forever. In the end, GitHub owns the infrastructure and services it's providing and can do what it wants with it.
"This repository experiences a huge volume of fetches (multiple fetches per second on average). We understand that part of the CocoaPods workflow is that its end users (i.e., not just the people contributing to CocoaPods/Specs) fetch regularly from GitHub"
Actually, in the text, I guess no one voting me down has actually read it, he pretty clearly defines the developers as the people who contribute to the packages, not the people who download and use them. It's like saying, as an IDE user, you are a developer of the project, you are not, you are an end user of a developer product. The end users, in this case, software developers, are using it as a CDN. It's pretty clearly stated in multiple places, github is not a CDN.
Except the original quote in this comment chain was "Discounting the fact that CocoaPods is used by millions of iOS developers." so that's what 'developers' was referring to in the comment you originally replied to
It's abuse. Wasn't intentional, but at the scale that Cocoapods is running it's abuse.