you’re not wrong, but it also allows more than 99.8% of the bot traffic through too on text challenges. Its like the TSA of website security. Its mostly there to keep the user busy while cloudflare places itself in a man in the middle of your encrypted connection to a third party. The only difference between cloudflare and a malicious attacker is cloudflares stated intention not to be evil. With that and 3 dollars I can buy myself a single hard shell taco from tacobell.

they cant get their ai to check a box that says “I am not a robot”? I’d think thatd be a first year comp sci student level task. And robots.txt files were basically always voluntary compliance anyway.