That said, what I am missing from these articles is an actual solution. Obviously we don't want Cloudflare from becoming an internet gatekeeper. It's a bad solution. But: it's a bad solution to an even worse problem.
Alternatives do exist, even decentralised ones, in the form of remote attestation ("can't access this website without secure boot and a TPM and a known-good operating system"), paying for every single visit or for subscriptions to every site you visit (which leads to centralisation because nobody wants a subscription to just your blog), or self-hosted firewalls like Anubis that mostly rely on AI abuse being the result of lazy or cheap parties.
People drinking the AI Kool-Aid will tell you to just ignore the problem, pay for the extra costs, and scale up your servers, because it's *the future*, but ignoring problems is exactly why Cloudflare still exists. If ISPs hadn't ignored spoofing, DDoS attacks, botnets within their network, """residential proxies""", and other such malicious acts, Cloudflare would've been an Akamai competitor rather than a middle man to most of the internet.