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It's a crime to intentionally drive a car over someone. Legal systems vary across the world but I would imagine most of them account for mens rea.

So, crafting API calls to intentionally bring down a system most definitely can be a criminal offence.

Now if you're objection was to the use of felony as opposed to misdemeanor, then ignore whatever I said above.

The US unfortunately has intentionally vaguely written laws about misusing computer systems which can be interpreted to punish hackers and pentesters pretty harshly.

The CFAA is controversial because of how vague the statue is. It has no carveouts for vigilantes or "hack back", last I heard -- even though some in Congress were trying to push for "hack back" rights.

The DoJ is unlikely to prosecute a vigilante of scammers, but they have prosecuted others (eg. Aaron Swartz) who were doing a debatably morally upright actions while violating the letter of the law.

It’s a felony to mail people things? Not usually, but if you send them a pipe bomb it sure is.

This is an absurd analogy from where this began... I'm at most slowing down a server in Russia that is trying to defraud people, no one is getting hurt, and It's unlikely I'm costing them any money. Come back to reality.