Anubis is a Web AI Firewall Utility that weighs the soul of your connection using one or more challenges in order to protect upstream resources from scraper bots.

https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

I hate having to resort to something like that but crawlers have just become an unbearable plague these days.

It seems like it should be simple to integrate into the stack; but I am not an expert in Anubis nor Nginx.

https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/environments/nginx