Not sure if you‘ll read this 7 days after the fact, but an easier/caddy native way to deal with bots, in the sense of caddy-defender or Anubis would be a godsend.

Definitely something that's important. An Anubis caddy plugin is in the works too! See https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/issues/16

However anything in caddy would likely still be a plugin and non native