Sites aren’t getting ad clicks for this traffic. Thus, they have an incentive to do something. Cloudflare is just responding to the market. Is this response bad for us in the long run? Probably. Screaming about cloudflare isn’t going to change the market. You fix a problem with capitalism by using supply and demand levers. Everything else is folly.
I wonder if crawlers started letting ads through, and interacting with them a bit, if these complaints would go away. If we can just shaft the advertisers, maybe that will solve the whole problem :)