My guess is that these tools tend to be targeted at mid-sized sites — the sorts of places that are large enough to have useful content, but small enough that there probably won't be any significant repercussions, and where the ops team is small enough (or plain nonexistent) that there's not going to be much in the way of blocks. That's why a site like SourceHut gets hit quite badly, but smaller blogs stay largely out of the way.

But that's just a working theory without much evidence trying to justify why I'm hearing so many people talking about struggling with AI bot traffic and not seeing it myself.