> The new one is built behind walls of 402 payment required. Visitors have to pay their freight else the servers get overwhelmed.

This is similar faulty logic the Elon era X/Twitter used to try to "stop" bots - forcing them to pay $Y dollars a month to use the platform. To a botter, that is a dream - you mean I can just pay to get past your defenses, and once I'm in, it's assumed my traffic is good? Sign me up, instantly.

There is no dollar amount using this structure that genuine users are willing to pay that will also stop botting.

A bot is only economical by quantity. Do you think spammers are going to pay for having 10.000 bot accounts per website?

Or you assumed that they pay for only one bot and that bot will be allowed to make 500 posts per second?