because customers are charged so much for crawler traffic that they're leaving the platform.

And also that if anyone wants to change it, it's trivial to change the defaults and Discourse has a lot of weight to throw around because people usually don't change defaults.

Bing ended up fixing it because they were the adults in the room. When people pointed out that Discourse's change would cause problems for people, leadership responded with nonsensical angry comments: https://meta.discourse.org/t/handling-bingbot/84659/22.