Why is getting a manifest considered against pull rate limits?

[rimelek (Ákos Takács)]

I just found this topic and realized you also asked about it in another topic where I replied

Why end-3 /v2/<name>/manifests/<reference> counted as a pull?

Unfortunately I can’t tell what the exact reason was, but as far as I know, a pull is any GET .*/manifest/.* request, except that for multi-arch images 1 request contains one on the index and one on the platform specific manifest so basically 20 requests would be 10 pulls. There is a different approach used for the Dashboard however, but since it is not real-time, it is not used for rate limiting. In the future Docker might have a better approach for rate limiting as they are working on improv…

So short answer here, yes, it is intentional, but I have no information about why.