“I don’t think any bots hover and instead just use JS to interact with the page, so I can, with reasonable certainty, assume that this is a human reader.”
Bear counts a read when a hover fires a CSS border-image request. No JavaScript, no cookies, and the IP gets hashed with the date and scrubbed nightly. Adblockers break Google Analytics, Fathom and Plausible alike. A stylesheet request gets counted anyway. Tracking scripts were always about the tracker, not the count.