> It's why it was shut down, the API was getting hammered and it cost too much to run at a reasonable speed and implement rate limiting or whatever.

Sort of: the original search API used a POST and was structured with XML-RPC. PyPI’s operators went to great efforts to scale it, but that wasn’t a great starting point. A search API designed around caching (like the one used on PyPI’s web UI) wouldn’t have those problems.