Visions of vast data centers surrounded by fields of browning grass, in which aging, rusting, formerly extremely expensive hardware is spending billions of compute cycles looking at anime catgirls

It's very likely the last few years of bot behavior is the consequence of the residential proxy business booming. This is indirectly due to AI company crawling, but the fact that they are as cheap and available as they are changes the incentives for anyone using them toward reckless and unsustainable request behavior, as there is no risk of burning your IPs, and very small chances of seeing any consequences of essentially DDoS:ing a website.

Unfortunately we're apt to run into some kind of Jeavons Paradox where the hardware gets so much faster in those few years will be able to slurp massive amounts of data cheaply so the problem never really ends.