This is like getting angry at cookie banners instead of all the companies tracking and selling your data.

You're complaining about the symptom (needing to have these checks) not the cause (if they don't, 99% of their traffic will be bots, the site will slow to a crawl and be unusable anyway).

In any case, I saw the dumb anime girl for about 2s then the site loaded. Not a big deal.

The GCC bug tracker uses the meta-refresh challenge, which does not require JavaScript. Due to the fact that the server makes sure the client has waited at least 75% as long as it should, the HTML has to add one second to the meta-refresh wait. Patches welcome. Meta refresh granularity is in single digit seconds.

The Anubis challenge took ~5 seconds.

What do you propose instead?