72 requests per day _per user with a naive feed reader_. This is a small personal blog with no ads that OP is self-hosting on her own hardware, so blocking all this junk traffic is probably saving her money. Plus she's calling attention to how feed readers can be improved!
Even if they had 1000 feed readers which would be a massive amount for a blog, if you can't scale that cheaply, that's on you.
As I pointed out, her blog and rate limiting are an extreme edge case, it would be silly for anyone to put effort into changing their feed reader for a single small blog. It's bad product management.
Of course she can. It's static. She doesn't want and I understand. She's signaling their clients an standard call to say "I think you already have read this, at lest ask me first when this changed the last time".
