Posting this in case it helps another - I was getting bot message incessantly - tried in chrome,edge, firefox, opera - I even logged into our company browserstack.com site and ultimately I'd get to varying degrees of through my booking but ultimately some issue would come up and the bot message and couldn't get the job done.

I was literally about to give up - I installed Brave browser and boom - smooth at pie - all the way through and booked flight. So in case anyone else has any horrific experience with this - give that browser a whirl and maybe you'll actually get somewhere!