I wonder if there were power surges or some other electrical problem that kept on killing the motors.

RedLib presently spoofs the OAuth tokens and behavior of the official Android app to access the website, so they are kind of doing something like that already.

The challenge for instance operators is routing the traffic appropriately to avoid the inevitable rate limiting from Reddit for popular RedLib instances.

Instance operators end up using a variety of approaches to get around this such as having multiple RedLib instances each with its own IP so that if one becomes rate limited, their site can switch over to another instance while the rate limit cools down.