> We placed our regular expressions in fail2ban, and found that we were hitting the maximum rules that could be added to UFW firewall rules on our systems which showed degradation around 65,000 rules

Firewalld had a similar issue up until recently as well.

are scrapers attackers?

I get they're DDoS; but take the mask off, and arn't they just the AI monied interests that fund the FSF? and a lot of them are just active inference, eg, the user is trying to ask about something and the AI monied interests setup a web scraper to go and get that data.

Just seems like no one wants to call out the hand that feeds them in a human centipede that's best described as the torment nexus.