OTOH Homebrew also uses github as its package host and has a respectable 62000 commits and 5600 contributors and github seems to be just fine with it.
The big differences seems to be in the way they do their thing: I'm reasonably sure homebrew just git clones then updates the local repository normally[0], it has "only" 2500 files in Library/Formula, and because of its different subject it is way less write-active, CocoaPod has 1k commits/week which look to be increasing pretty much constantly, homebrew is around 350 with ups and downs.
Also not sure it matters, but homebrew has lots of commits updating existing formula, cocoapod changes are almost solely addition (publishing a new version of a package adds a new spec and doesn't touch the old one)
[0] which is exactly the bread and butter of github
The fact that Github added an API specifically to reduce the server load from Homebrew suggests that it wasn't "just fine". One of the Homebrew maintainers works for GH so they just had a much more direct route to solving the problem than with CocoaPods.
In this case it's actually more that there's a Homebrew maintainer who works for GitHub (me) who has been working on a bunch of improvements to Homebrew's update system (in my spare time). The desire for the API came from Homebrew's side rather than GitHub's and, as it reduces load for GitHub, it was a net win for both parties.
Thankfully, none of Homebrew's binaries are stored on GitHub.
Most of the changes committed to Homebrew are formulae-based; of the ~5600 contributors in Homebrew's lifetime only ~430 have contributed to the core code.
The big differences seems to be in the way they do their thing: I'm reasonably sure homebrew just git clones then updates the local repository normally[0], it has "only" 2500 files in Library/Formula, and because of its different subject it is way less write-active, CocoaPod has 1k commits/week which look to be increasing pretty much constantly, homebrew is around 350 with ups and downs.
Also not sure it matters, but homebrew has lots of commits updating existing formula, cocoapod changes are almost solely addition (publishing a new version of a package adds a new spec and doesn't touch the old one)
[0] which is exactly the bread and butter of github