They are not a problem unless you "believe" it is a problem. I estimate around 20-25K hits to my website from bots per day and I have all cloudflare protections disabled. Any decently optimized server should be able to easily handle that. (it's roughly 1 request every 3 seconds).

Yes and that is just the bot background radiation of the internet. I run a primary source of information site and these botnets are aggressive to a DDOS level. All to do some sort of scraping. Because they have sophisticated enough tactics to DDOS us if they wanted to. However I am not sure their objective as they have wasted enough of our resources to have scraped all our content 1000s of times over. That 25k traffic is a couple of minutes for us. And that adds up. 80-90pct of our traffic is this

True. But it still wastes your server resources, right? And it's sad that you have to accept that as part of the "cost" of hosting a site ...