The point is how expensive it is. For your 1 request, you wait 2 seconds, and the power draw is a minor inconvenience. For the massive botfarm, it adds up to days of CPU time and a significant portion of the electricity bill.
Tavis Ormandy wrote that he believes that the cost of scraping websites protected by Anubis is negligible: “I don’t think we reach a single cent per month in compute costs until several million sites have deployed Anubis.”
The point is how expensive it is. For your 1 request, you wait 2 seconds, and the power draw is a minor inconvenience. For the massive botfarm, it adds up to days of CPU time and a significant portion of the electricity bill.
A small price for the unlimited government subsidy to pay