What is the role of Cloudflare's 'Challenge' feature (e.g., CAPTCHAs) in DDoS mitigation and how does it affect response time?

The 'Challenge' feature presents a hurdle to automated bots and attackers, reducing the volume of malicious traffic. While it adds a slight delay for legitimate users, it significantly reduces the overall attack volume, allowing the DDoS mitigation system to operate more efficiently and potentially reducing the overall mitigation time.