I have blocked much of the Digital Ocean IP space

Over the years, I have blocked the entire probably Digital Ocean spectrum, a ton of Linode, clients.your-server.de, a long string of them. It used to make me paranoid I was setting up something wrong. I'd fire up a brand new, untouched server, and boom! Here they'd come. Then I thought, maybe it was a few Docker containers pushing analytics to a collector. Upon blocking them tho, nothing seemed to malfunction. So instead of trying mitigate each and every offending IP, I switched to a deny all until something complains posture, and block by ip ranges. I can still see them trying to gain access, but as long as I can keep them out on the edge, everything is golden.

Some ISPs basically advertise to criminals about their ability to evade take down orders and unwillingness to work with law enforcement.

There are Russian ISPs that advertise VPS services and such by the hour. I'm sure there are other ISPs in other countries that do the same. Nothing good could be coming out of that. When you consider that the internet gobbles through 14,000,000+/- petabytes per 24 hours, and 40%+/- is bot traffic, the picture gets a bit clearer, because that's a shit load of bots, and they are sophisticated bots at that.