This reminds me of an episode of Taskmaster where a contestant plans to gain extra time by hitting the alarm in the lift (elevator) but instead of slamming to a halt there's just a little voice message and the lift carries on as usual.
Deebster
You're right, and it's infuriating that the AI scrapers are just so lazy/incompetent that they do things like try to scrape every dynamic page of a git repo instead of just cloning it. Similarly, they could just connect over ActivityPub and it wouldn't have much more overhead than another private instance.
There's Anubis which uses JavaScript to force browsers to do some work before they can access, but given how unpopular Cloudflare is around here, I imagine there'd be a lot of complaints if it was deployed on every instance.
On Friday I spent over an hour trying to fix my Firefox tabs - I could no longer drag them to reorder or to a new window, and ctrl-shift-T didn't restore tabs, but I could still do it via menus. I thought it might be something to do with the new tab-island stuff and tried FF safe mode, restarting computer, confirming about:config options, etc.
Turns out my headphones were resting on my Esc key.
Podlet is really useful in this area.