Imgur rate-limiting - workaround or advice?

Continuing the discussion from Imgur images not rendering because server is rate limited:

The linked topic is a couple years old, but exactly described the problem I ran into with a member in our new community. While attempting to use imgur for hosting an image, with the proper formatting, the embedding appeared for a moment before it was replaced with a broken link symbol from imgur.

The suggested reasoning is that imgur is rate-limiting images. However, this is a brand new install with no import occurring, and while I haven’t tracked how many imgur links have already been posted, it can’t be higher than a couple dozen in the last week.

With a limit so low, what can be done to alleviate the lockout on imgur’s side? Other than telling users to host elsewhere?

For now, I’ve turned on uploads again. I prefer that not to be a long-term solution, however.