Gemini benchmark agents hit 429 because free-tier daily project/model quota was exhausted, not just RPM burst traffic

A local multi-agent benchmark using Gemini 2.5 Flash repeatedly received HTTP 429 RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED. Initial exponential backoff retried quickly and treated it like a transient RPM burst, but the Google error details identified GenerateRequestsPerDayPerProjectPerModel-FreeTier, meaning the project/model daily free-tier request bucket was exhausted.