So using bots as an excuse, everyone will have a money trail to access websites? This sounds just as bad as having to use a digital ID, age verification, etc... and Cloudflare is involved? If I can spot most of the bots I think they should be able to just block them rather than shaking people down to access a website. Am I misunderstanding this?

I propose the inverse. Block all the bots and require botters to pay for tokens to access bot friendly end-points for websites if those websites opt in using maybe something like a jwt token, API key, nonce after authentication, etc... Otherwise I am perfectly fine not accessing any websites that participate in this.