> it often didn't work because it tripped the maximum downloads per month limit.

it always work if you login into a Google account prior to downloading. If you don't, indeed the downloads will regularly fail.

> it always work[s]

That was not my experience, at least for very large files (100+ GB). There was a workaround (that has since been patched) where you could link files into your own Google drive and circumvent the bandwidth restriction that way. The current workaround is to link the files into a directory and then download the directory containing the link as an archive, which does not count against the bandwidth limit.