Copying very large repo (30k issues, 33k PRs)

I want to keep a local copy of metadata for qgis/QGIS, which is quite large with 30k issues and 33k pull requests. Has anyone used github-to-sqlite for anything like that?

The GitHub API has a rate limit of 5,000 API calls per hours, for authenticated users. And I think it takes one call for each issue - am I right? And github-to-sqlite does not offer only fetching only some subset of the issues, and furthermore does not commit to sqlite before all issues are fetched (so in case a call is interrupted, e.g. by the rate limit, the fetched data is simply discarded).

So I don't see any way that I can actually use github-to-sqlite for this (unless I pay for such privileges to github). Can you confirm?

Sincerely, Thomas