Aha, that's where the anime girl is from. What sort of traffic was getting past that but still thwarted by the cookie tactic?

I guess the bots are all spoofing consumer browser UAs and just the slightest friction outside of well-known tooling will deter them completely.

Yep, that’s why that’s all over the place now. The cookie thing is more of a first line of defense. It turns away a lot of shoddy scrapers with nearly no resources on my side. Anubis knocks out almost all of the remainder.