> That's how ads work. More visitors more pageviews/clicks.
That's not asking people to pay for bandwidth/compute power, it's selling something adjacent to your content that you hope makes up for the loss.
> People who serve ads don't want to pay for bots which is why they are a problem.
That's kind of my point. When you ignore the arbitrage potential of serving requests for free, it forces you to care about making sure that your content is only available to the "right" users. You have to care about things like scraping/bots, because you're not directly covering your server costs, you're swallowing your server costs and just hoping that ads make up the difference.
Theoretically, in a world where server costs were directly transferred to the people accumulating those costs, you wouldn't need to care about bots. In fact, in that world, you shouldn't care whether or not I'm using an automated browser, since digital resources aren't limited by physical constraints.
In most cases, the only practical limit to how many people can visit a website is the hardware/cost associated with running it. A website isn't like an iPhone where we can run out of physical units to sell. So if they're paying for the resources they use, who cares if bots make a substantial portion of your traffic?
> Doesn't medium do this?
No, Medium just sells subscriptions, you don't pay for server usage. As far as I know, no one does this -- probably in part because of problems I haven't thought of, also probably in part because there are no good micro-payment systems online (and arguably no really good payment systems at all).
The closest real-world example is probably AWS, where customers pay directly for the resources they use. But those costs aren't then directly passed onto the user.