alt Hacker NewsContracting with their colocation facilities is exactly how that's supposed to work. If you don't actually operate a wide area network then you aren't supposed to be registered in these databases and have IP blocks. The exception is people who do anycast, but VPN companies don't.
You know all these guys just switch to residential proxies if they detect a site is blocking data centers, right? Because that's a very common thing to do.
Not sure what you mean by your first comment - there is no technical reason that I know of that prevents a VPN provider from having their own ASN and address space.
As for the latter comment....not sure what your implication is. Yes, bot/spam mitigation is whackamole, but there are consequences for not playing the game of whackamole. Luckily residential proxies are few and far between so far, but they will grow in popularity. When they do, and I can't get by with the occasional individual residential IP ban, we'll come up with other methods to handle.
Luckily the signal is strong with vulnerability scanning, which makes it pretty easy to automate. The only reason to put up whole ASN mitigation (captcha/turnstile, outright bans) is just efficiency. Nothing stopping individual IP banning. The scrapers are the tricky ones, since they more easily hide in legit traffic. However legit traffic has patterns that scrapers do not emulate (at least for a service like ours with millions of pieces of user generated content that's easily walkable), so you can still pull out the signal. It's just a little trickier.
Definitely a continual arms race though.