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.
My obscure site for my small business is getting hundreds of thousands of hits a month and its practically all bots.
When Cloudflare says bots are most traffic nowadays, I believe it based off what I see.