Go's package manager, `go get`, also downloads from GitHub. I don't know the details of how `go get` and CocoaPods work, but I would be interested in learning why one is unscalable and the other seems to work.
Because cloning the dependency is not the issue here. CocoaPods is keeping its index in a git repo that is updated by the user as a way to get the latest index. This is the repo that incur a lot of requests from everyone.
Go get on the other hand doesn't keep any index. It just uses the url to download the dependency because of the mapping "url==project name" that exists with go projects.
