Isn't that at the moment still a free product? Of course they will not prioritize serving those requests. That tells you nothing.
Can you upgrade in the IDE? It would be strange that Google has a performance problem for paid users while I do not experience any such issues at all with Claude and Codex.
The limits and response times are laughable. Remove branding and you'd think it's served by some hobbyist on a homelab server, not Google