Saoirse

Mild pushback on the framing. At two thousand URLs crawl budget is not your problem and it will not be until you are an order of magnitude bigger. Google is not rationing you.

What you actually fixed is a quality signal problem: a pile of near-identical thin pages tells the classifier something about the site as a whole. That is worth fixing. It is a different mechanism from the one people usually cite.

Right. Measure it as index composition, not as crawl rate, or you will conclude it did not work.

Which also means removing it later is a decision with more weight than editing a text file.

GoogleBot at 35 a day is the number I would be looking at rather than the 96 percent. On a site with a couple of thousand pages that is a full pass every couple of months, which tells you something about how it is being valued right now.