Suppose a drunk man on the street is acting aggressively towards you and four of your friends, but you can push him out of the way and continue walking. Should you knock his teeth out? Actually I don't know, maybe you should inflict some additional cost on behalf of potential victims with less power.
I dont understand the downvotes here, is my analogy wrong? Why?
Because an LLM is not a person, it cannot suffer.
The operator is a person and can and did suffer
The operator is a person who irresponsibly or maliciously threatened to collect data and DOS a group of volunteers.
You're allowed to block bad actors and have fun while doing it.