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Seems to me like they priced the API to cash in on the LLM training data gold rush, and as a side-effect it makes third-party user apps infeasible. Oops.

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They priced the API for LLM training and killing third-party apps is just a great bonus. If they wanted to retain third-party apps while protecting their revenue stream they could have simply created a new free API including all the ads. They deliberately chose to kill these apps.

Why wouldn’t people then just scrape using the free API?

You can throttle APIs so they are still useful for a human browsing content, but essentially worthless for scraping meaningful amounts of data.

You can also detect accounts that are displaying scraping behavior and block them.

An LLM only has to download text once. You could easily coordinate a scrape across various IPs and accounts over the course of a couple of months and it would be really hard to detect. Especially if you target alternate GUI api based versions of the site.

Most users are not technical

Most technical users are still happy to use a GUI over writing their own scraper / visualizer

I think Hanlon's Razor applies here.

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