Because AI scraping is everywhere and flooding sites with useless traffic. It’s not ideal, but it’s the best people can do atm

"It's not ideal" is an understatement, I have to do stupid captchas for about half my Google searches.

What kind of blog gets flooded by what, 10/100 req/s at max? Seems somewhere along the line we forgot how to deploy and run infrastructure on the internet, if some basic scrapers manage to down your website.