I think people get annoyed when it's suggested they spend time optimising or even re-writing their websites to handle high traffic loads just to cater to AI bots ripping their content.
It's also not always easy to do. I run a small wiki which is fairly optimised, nearly every page manages at least ~3k rps on a small VPS. The only exception is the diff page which is ~150 rps. Optimising that while still giving good output isn't that easy, but the wiki doesn't have many users so that would be fine if it wasn't for the AI bots.
The AI bots ignore robots.txt and were initially hitting the site with ~1k rps crawling every combination. Even that would be manageable as there's currently ~150,000 combinations, except they kept re-crawling the whole lot each day. The server could manage it but it was a massive waste of resources.
They were using residential IPs and only sending 1 request from each IP making it impossible to block. In the end I gave up and put a Cloudflare challenge in front of it. I don't want to use Cloudflare but the alternative is forcing users to login to view diffs or remove them entirely.
What I do is have more strict rate limits for non logged in users. You tell them to log in if they hit the rate limit. For non logged in users, you have a rate limit not just for IP, but also for /24 and /16. Forget about IPv6, IPv4 scarcity is a feature not a bug.
Curious, but how do the bots figure out the combinations? Or do you have links to the diffs from other sites? I assume the diff takes two files in query parameters or something.