I once heard from someone in Google's antibot department that they thought they had properly set up the disincentives so it cost more than it was worth to run b

I once heard from someone in Google's antibot department that they thought they had properly set up the disincentives so it cost more than it was worth to run bots — and then some election cycle (2016 US?) arrived and they discovered that for some purposes people are willing to lose arbitrary amounts of money.