12ft hasn't worked against many prominent U.S.-based site paywalls for a while now even though other paywall-bypassing methods still work on those sites. So I had presumed the author had already been catering to some of these angry letters sent to him. Author did mention he had received at least 4 E-mails regarding such matters from Vercel in the past year. Vercel probably resorted to the nuclear option to finally get his focused attention.