Valve changes rate limitations for Steam

I guess too many people abuse it?

I don't know the reason. But your guess is always true: A small minority of abusers destroys the fun for the majority of people. It's always the case.

abuse

Counter example: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1333350/Angel_Legion/ (warning: mature content)

This a free-to-play game with so many free DLCs (100+). Besides how tedious it is, just try to add them all and you will hit the rate limit...

So the abuse is really on the developer side 😂

Ah.
So it is either A) or B)

A) Activate 30 packages, wait 90 minutes, activate 30 packages again.
B) Activate 30 packages, after that activate 1 package every 3 minutes which equates to 30 packages in 90 minutes

So you either be active and activate 1 package every 3 minutes or be passive and after 90 minutes activate 30 packages at once. The total number of activated packages stays the same.

Yes, people do. And not only people who activate free licenses.
There were times where I would buy more than 100 games in a single day during winter or summer sale and all this just in one single cart (so they all were activated at the same time).
Granted, I am not the norm, but us hardcore game collectors are a crazy and peculiar bunch :D

When jogcast bundles go live it usually contains over 60 games.
So when you buy one of those it is necessary to wait.
Those two or three bundles that I have bought there are the only occasions I saw this restriction

Yes. Depends on how many bundle purchases they hold back on activating. I buy a lot of bundles per month, averaging 6-8 games per bundle. If I were to buy 5 bundles in a month, that's at least 30 games.. combined with any other purchases I've made. If I were lazy and didn't activate bundles for a couple of months, I'd easily surpass the new limit. I usually activate games after I've bought them though (or wait a couple of weeks till the refund period is over) so it's not a big deal for me, but I can see it being an issue for others.

I've had friends that buy bundles but didn't activate them for years. I know it's a bad idea to do that but people like that are out there.

If activations weren't limited it would be abused for guessing (valid) Steam keys.

theres also DLC heavy games that sometimes get the DLC bundles where every dlc is a single key... can easily hit the limit on those.

Out of curiosity I went scrolling through my activations list and managed to find a week in January of 2017 when for some reason I was activating between 10 to 15 keys per day, I guess I bought a lot of bundles that week.
The thing is that I remember once buying a bundle that had like 30 keys in it, couldn't find it tho, but my point is that it happens sometimes. I also know that sometimes I bought games that came with all the DLC included but as separate keys instead of being one package.