Instead of punishing a criminal, you make everybody pay.

This is not only unfair to legitimate users having to pay.

It also needs to explain what actually happens when the Ddos succeeds (I know, you are talking about scrapers, but what’s the difference really?). Does that mean that the attacker just gets to shrug it off.

Don’t take my statements as facts, I just want to outline a few reason I could come up with that show a purely technical solution might not be enough.

Akin to “just use Cloudflare, it’s free”.

Yes it works but why conceding defeat and say “oh from now on you depend on a business to publish a server”?