Thanks for the mention! I'm the founder of browserless.io, and agree with pretty much everything you're saying.
Our infrastructure actually does procedure for some of our scraping needs: we scrape puppeteer's GH documentation page to build out our debugger's autocomplete tool. To do this, we "goto" the page, extract the page's content, and then hand it off to nodejs libraries for parsing. This has two benefits: it cuts down the time you have the browser open and running, and let's you "offload" some of that work to your back-end with more sophisticated libraries. You get the best of both worlds with this approach, and it's one we generally recommend to folks everywhere. Also a great way that we "dogfood" our own product as well :)