I think that's been seen and reported before, it not yet fixed. If you try to fetch archives forward of that date they should exist where games were played.
I queried whether the list of archives was therefore worth maintaining, of if we should just probe from the date of joining forward or current date backward.
I imagine the list of archives will remain:
a) less redesign to fix it
b) faster to access existing archives than to ask for ones that don't exist.
I assume it's the SSL negotiation at the start of each endpoint access, but try a few thousand in a row each triggering a second access and ... wait.
(Today I fetched all account names for players listing "Australia" (AU) as their country, and then from their profile their location. Some of our state-based teams want to find out who they're missing.
The item I overlooked was that of the 4000+ who gave location information, it's entirely unstructured and I'm having to search the web manually to find out which state some of the locations are in. Others of course are nonsense and I ignore those.)
Not all available archives are listed for @tombulous. It would seem the archives stops on December 2010
https://api.chess.com/pub/player/tombulous/games/archives