We had a similar thing happen with our company. Google had given a bigquery concurrent query limit extension to 300 queries. In January they removed the extension back down to 100 concurrent queries because they were introducing “query queues” that should cover the difference.
Unfortunately for us, query queues only affect spikes in concurrent queries and not overall throughput. We’ve been struggling with bigquery support ever since.
Quota management is indeed nonsensical. We serve large cash assistance programs that have stampedes of people applying all at once where we needed decent geocoding to determine eligibility. We were exceeding the default 50qps quota. I asked nicely (to double it, I think) and explained our use case and they said... no.
So... we left and switched to Smarty and haven't looked back since. We spend tens of thousands on geocoding annually. Really mind-boggling behavior from GCP.
I too was confused, all Google search result was PHP templating library. So I re-read the comment and added "smarty geocoding" to display correct result.
Unfortunately for us, query queues only affect spikes in concurrent queries and not overall throughput. We’ve been struggling with bigquery support ever since.