I think the parent comment's claim is that serving a CAPTCHA page to potential attackers may actually be more resource intensive than serving a lightweight page that has the actual content on it.

So, you posit, that Cloudflare has never thought of this before or weighed the pros/cons before building an entire business out of it? Sure.

Typically, the pages that Cloudflare protects are not especially lightweight or efficient.

No. It's that Basement Bob's Raspberry Pi doesn't need to.

I don’t think your line of reasoning was very coherent, and displayed a lack of understanding of reality.