Hi Jay, I have disabled downloading all hotlinked images, because my forum has tons of them and I don’t want to deal with all the storage space.
It still seems to me that Discourse shouldn’t fail to generate <img> tags just because the link throws a 429 error. It’s treating it as if it were a 404 link, whereas a 429 by definition means that it’s a working link. If the link ends in .jpg or .png or whatever and it’s not a 404 then it should wrap it in <img> tags and be done with it. It would even show up correctly in the post preview that way.