Since yesterday a lot of users in Europe found their workflows failing due to Github seemingly randomly throwing HTTP/401 on git clone/git pull when interacting with public repos without authentication.
It was now confirmed by staff member that this indeed is intentional and no further steps are planned at this point.
I expect they are for GitHub. GitHub is really well known and huge so it makes sense to set up specific scrapers for it.
Fair enough, may as well be the case.