Next step would be requiring UK ISPs to block traffic to the VPNs. They’ve already made it so you can’t go to some sites based on DNS lookups, so there’s precedent. Making it by IP address from a continuously-updated list would make it exceedingly difficult for regular users to access a public VPN, and while making one yourself from a VPS is straightforward, it can get expensive very quickly if you want to watch videos or download lots of stuff through it.

I’d be amazed if this works, since these sorts of tricks have been around since dinosaurs ruled the Earth, and most bots will use pretty modern zip libraries which will just return “nope” or throw an exception, which will be treated exactly the same way any corrupt file is - for example a site saying it’s serving a zip file but the contents are a generic 404 html file, which is not uncommon.

Also, be careful because you could destroy your own device? What the hell? No. Unless you’re using dd backwards and as root, you can’t do anything bad, and even then it’s the drive contents you overwrite, not the device you “destroy”.