It is rather disingenuous to backpedal from "you can easily block them" to "is that a problem? who even cares" when someone points out that you cannot in fact easily block them.
I was referring to legitimate ones, which you can easily block. Obviously there are scammy ones as well, and yes it is an issue, but for most sites I would say the cloudflare cure is worse than the problem it's trying to cure.
But is there any actual evidence that any major AI bots are bypassing robots.txt? It looked as if Perplexity was doing this, but after looking into it further it seems that likely isn't the case. Quite often people believe single source news stories without doing any due diligence or fact checking.
I haven't been in the weeds in a few months, but last time I was there we did have a lot of traffic from bots that didn't care about robots. Bytedance is one that comes to mind.
