

The images probably don’t have to look meaningful as long as it is difficult to distinguish them from real images using a fast, statistical test. Nepenthes uses Markov chains to generate nonsense text that statistically resembles real content, which is a lot cheaper than LLM generation. Maybe Markov chains would also work to generate images? A chain could generate each pixel by based on the previous pixel, or based on neighbors, or some such thing.
It looks like the setting is
max_parallel_downloads
in/etc/dnf/dnf.conf
. Here’s a post on how to increase it - so do the opposite, and set it to 1.