I don’t think (completely wild guess here) AI content crawlers should have any more impact than the dozens and dozens of spiders that make up must of my own site’s traffic.

The impact was magnified for Twitter because it generates so much new content every second. That wasn’t an issue when Twitter had a nice, properly cached API and it shouldn’t be an issue for fediverse instances either because we have RSS and caching and we’re not so stupid as to turn those off. Like, what kind of moron would do that?