There are sevrail types of quotas with Google apis.

Project based quotas which effect your project itself. These quotas can be extended. If for example you your project can make 10000 requests pre 100 seconds. you could request that this be extended.

Then there is the user based quotas. these quotas limit how much each user can send.

User Rate Limit Exceeded

Means that you are hitting a user rate quota. User rate quotas are flood protection they ensure that a single user of your application can not make to many requests at once.

These quotas can not be extended.

if you are getting a user rate limiting quota then you need to slow down your application and implement exponential backoff.

How you implement exponential backoff is up to you and the language you are using but it basically involves just retrying the same request again only adding wait times each time it fails

the graph

the graph in the google cloud console is an guestimate and it is not by any means accurate. If you are getting the error message you should go by that and not by what the graph says.

In my case, I was recursing through Google Drive folders in parallel and getting this error. I solved the problem by implementing client-side rate limiting using the Bottleneck library with a 110ms delay between requests:

const limiter = new Bottleneck({
    // Google allows 1000 requests per 100 seconds per user,
    // which is 100ms per request on average. Adding a delay
    // of 100ms still triggers "rate limit exceeded" errors,
    // so going with 110ms.
    minTime: 110,
});

// Wrap every API request with the rate limiter
await limiter.schedule(() => drive.files.list({
    // Params...
}));