It's weird that you get offended by something which was not directed at you.

"The work" is providing those better alternatives to anubis, that everyone in this thread except for Xe seem to know all about.

The humility is about accepting the fact that the solution works for some people, the small site operators that get hammered by DDoSes and unethical LLM over crawling, despite not being perfect. And if that inconveniences you as a user of those sites - which I imagine is what you mean by "user backlash", the solution for you is to stop going there, not talk down at them for doing something about an issue that impacts them.