Most probably cloud based scraping services were not available in 2012. Now there are services available like scraperapi and others that don't need you to install anything at your end. You pay them, use their cloud infra, infinite proxies and even headless browsers. Shameless plug, I had written about it a few years ago on my blog post [1]

[1] https://blog.adnansiddiqi.me/scraping-dynamic-websites-using...