A giga load balancer is no less viable than a giga Redis cache or a giga database. Rate limiting is inherently stateful - you can't rate limit a request without

A giga load balancer is no less viable than a giga Redis cache or a giga database. Rate limiting is inherently stateful - you can't rate limit a request without knowledge of prior requests, and that knowledge has to be stored somewhere. You can shift the state around, but you can't eliminate it. Sure, some solutions tend to be more efficient than others, but those typically boil down to implementation details rather than fundamental limitations in system design.