I am not trying to "make an exception", I'm asking for information external to Cloudflare so I can look at what people are experiencing and compare with what our systems are doing and figure out what needs to improve.
It's not that hard. If the content being requested is RSS (or Atom, or some other syndication format intended for consumption by software), just don't do bot checks, use other mechanisms like rate limiting if you must stop abuse.
As an example: would you put a captcha on robots.txt as well?
As other stories here can attest to, Cloudflare is slowly killing off independent publishing on the web through poor product management decisions and technology implementations, and the fix seems pretty simple.
As another commenter noted, not even CF's own RSS feed seems to get the content type right. This issue could clearly use some work.