This sounds like it would break a bunch of email address verification systems, password recovery links and the like. I wonder if indeed it does break them, but since it only affects smaller websites nobody seems to care.
On non-jailbroken iOS devices the only way to install apps is through the App Store or through some convoluted methods which involve having a developer account (which you must pay yearly for), and I believe the % of jailbroken iOS devices is much much lower than the % of people willing to install Android APKs outside of Google Play, anyway. Sure, they _could_ do that for few people who have jailbroken iPhones, but doing that is pretty much like giving up on their iOS app altogether.
I had heard about this giant JSON from friends in the GTA V modding community. OP's idea of what it is used for is right. My guess is that this JSON was quite smaller when the game released and has been increasing in size as they add more and more items to sell in-game. Additionally, I speculate that most of the people with the knowledge to do this sort of profiling moved on to work on other Rockstar titles, and the "secondary team(s)" maintaining GTA Online throughout most of its lifespan either didn't notice the problem, since it's something that has become worse slowly over the years, or don't have enough bandwidth to focus on it and fix it.
It's also possible they are very aware of it and are saving up this improvement for the next iteration of GTA Online, running on a newer version of their game engine :)
Based on what I saw in past discussions, I'm pretty sure that the takedown was not a run-of-the-mill scraper-based takedown (it makes no sense to be taken down just for linking to videos which, at best, is what any scrapers would have seen in the original test code). It was very much an intentional, manual one with actual lawyers behind it.
MySQL not having a proper type to express time spans seems like a fault to me, and "poor design". Of course you can just use an integer for it, but that is a slippery slope, in the end you'll find that you can use strings or byte arrays for everything and you end up with no type system at all.
The surprise here is not that the type has limits but that they are so awkward and that there is no better strongly-typed alternative.