In what circles is it a joke? Google bots seem to respect it on my sites according to logs.
so not seem to or apparently but matter of fact like. robots.txt works for the intended audience
[1] https://blog.google/technology/ai/an-update-on-web-publisher...
they're literally asking to break laws to train AI for national security. A sentence in a press release from 2 years ago is worthless... look at what they're actually doing