The point of this is to make things difficult for bots, not to annoy visitors of the site. I respect it is the dev's choice to do what they want with the software they create and make available for free. Anime is a polarizing format for reasons beyond the scope of this discussion. It definitely says a lot about the dev

Anime is only "polarizing" for an extreme subset of people. Most people won't care. No one should care, it's just a cute mascot image.

It says a lot more about the pearl clutching of the people complaining about it than it does the dev.