It used to be that the cost of scraping came with the benefit of being search engine listed which drove traffic, but that feels less true than it used to (for a lot of reasons).
But now the cost of scraping doesn't feel in the favour of a website.
Scraping and bots are for search engines listing, technology tests / experiments, advert / audience measurements, brand protection, IP tracking, copyright enforcement, screenshots for links on other websites (i.e. Facebook), Pinterest linkbacks, training of LLMs (my hypothesis on Bing's massive increase), spam, etc, etc.
With the search engine value lowered by less traffic, yet a solid community still growing via word of mouth... the rest of those things offer no value to me or the community. So I asked the community, what do you want to do here? Leave them all? Ban some? Ban all? Some midway thing?
Almost unanimously the community (who fund the costs by donations, and at least 30% of all traffic and costs were known to be associated to bots) chose to block every bot.
So that's what we've done.
We've blocked every major hosting and Cloud ASN, or put a challenge up to the few known to be proxies (i.e. Google Data Saver), and we've blocked hundreds of bot user agents, we've blocked requests where no Accept header was present where it should be, we've blocked TLS ciphers that aren't modern web browsers — I looked at requests by Python, Go, Curl, Wget, etc... and blocked everything that obviously differed from a valid browser.
In the end we blocked about 40% of our traffic, and so far not a single real human has said (and it's a tight-knit but large community with lots of ways of contacting me) that they've had any issue at all.
We appear to have reduced our traffic and associated costs, with no loss to us at all.