PoW difficulty can be scaled, eg: all cookies must work 1s, but 2nd cookie from the same ip, might have to do 2s of work

ideally one would pick something a bit more forgiving than a linear function, to avoid penalizing too much users connecting from CGNAT

I think we're talking about 2 different things. PoW is annoying for basic scrapers but it really doesn't affect enterprise grade bot operations with access to unlimited residential proxies.

look, if you have the kind of bank to pay $1/GB of web pages to get to whatever we're hosting, maybe just send an email to sales so we can give you discount on that.