The annoying part is a large percentage of misbehaving bots (not obeying robots.txt for example) are via end user proxies across the world. However most of these aren't doing full-browser loop, so if you are behind cloudflare, you can do non-interactive challenge and that can help quite a bit.

Yes! OP here. I did the non-interactive challenge, and yet all those Chinese bots in my article got through (which surprised me).