The endless browser wars

I interpreted production use as the load of a distribution's Chromium users, all of whom use the same keys. If you use your own keys, the key has a user population of 1, and developer quotas may be ok for that. Maybe. I used my own keys with the saiarcot PPA (as described here https://launchpad.net/~saiarcot895/+archive/ubuntu/chromi...) for Ubuntu, which for a long time was the best way to use vaapi decoding on Ubuntu (the maintainer did not include any keys with his build). I didn't run into any quota problems. In the Google thread, the Google dev asking as spokesperson said a workflow based on individual user keys may be disabled one way or another in the future.

I hope that the actions taken by distribution maintainers to "disable APIs" still allow for BYO keys, although 95% of my browsing is in Firefox due to the Container Tabs feature which is miles ahead of Google profile functionality.