HTTP/1.0 opened a fresh TCP connection for every single request. A brutal performance penalty, and nobody cared, because the client on the other end was reading, thinking, moving a cursor. The protocol's overhead hid inside human hesitation.
Every layer built on top inherited that calibration. Apache's keepalive timeout defaulted to 15 seconds: roughly the pause between clicks. Rate limits sat at single-digit requests per second. The Retry-After header imagined a patient visitor who'd wander off and come back later.
Agents don't wander. They queue. And thirty years of infrastructure shaped by human tempo now pushes back at a speed that made sense for readers, not for software completing tasks.