null has mentioned once or twice that he thinks it's feasible the background radiation of spam to be prevented, but that Cloudflare, Google, etc. choose not to because they passively profit from it. I don't know how that's possible, but perhaps the specifics don't even matter, as long as the incentive structure is there. The actual spam is just entropy in principle.

And it doesn't help that very few people actually use the clearnet and are instead populating the massive darknets that have cannibalized the Internet such as the site formerly known as Twitter, Facebook, Discord. And I do mean darknet, because you can't access any of that stuff publically, can't even scrape most things anymore; you need to make an account and an api key -- and even then, it's not easy to get a clear picture of what's going on.