I think you underestimate the difficulty in effectively gating user registration. If the anti-bot efforts in general don't work for other site pages, they won't work for signup functionality either.
replyI've been on the other side of this kind of thing (hero rather than villain, though I'm sure someone out there disagrees).
replyYou can fairly arbitrarily increase the difficulty of user registration, far beyond what users will tolerate for viewing an individual page. You can exploit this; a bot needs to make many accounts for the activity desired, and it's not hard to make "generate account" more expensive than it's worth for the amount of activity they get from each account.
If it costs your attacker a penny to solve the captcha to make an account, and they can only get 100 pages out of an account, you win.
What if you make MFA mandatory. Normal users should have little issues with that despite the increased friction but bots would struggle with this.
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