I just worry we're collapsing two things into one bucket:
harder in absolute terms vs harder relative to how much real engineering effort teams are willing to invest.
Those aren't the same, and to me the distinction matters.
I'm not fully convinced scraping has actually gotten harder.. It feels more like the average approach has gotten softer.
Lately everything gets framed as rising costs or unstoppable anti-bot systems, but most sites didn't suddenly become impenetrable. What changed is how people react to friction.
We're in an AI-autopilot phase now. Hit a block and the instinct is to buy more credits, switch vendors,, or let an API abstract the problem away. Meanwhile, teams still doing basic engineering work around sessions, behavior, pacing, and retries are often scraping the same targets just fine.
Honest question: have scraping costs really exploded, or have engineering standards quietly dropped as abstraction layers piled up?
Those aren't the same, and to me the distinction matters.