@norm yes, the "proof of work" challenge in all of these is useless and only serves to waste legitimate users' time while scrapers just move on javascript is a hard performance bottleneck for browsers (and even wasm has its limits) which makes it impossible to set the difficulty to a meaningful value; it's trivial to implement a native code solver that's several orders of magnitude faster without any optimization effort meanwhile iocaine's cookie monster literally only sets a cookie from js and you don't even notice it, and it's good enough because the problematic scrapers are so low-effort that they don't even try (though to be fair iocaine has a bunch of other heuristics to stop a significant chunk of the traffic from even getting that far)
