Yeah, totally agree. But I don't think they can keep it locked down any more, with the rise of computer use agents, the boundary between interfaces designed for humans and those designed for computers is becoming increasingly blurred.
I have an "image sorter" that ingests image galleries, it used to use a bookmarklet that cued a webcrawler but after a decade of having my time as a user wasted clicking on those Cloudflare thingies I finally had it get in the way of my webcrawler.
I was talking about options w/ Junie and it suggested, "why not write a browser extension?" and I'm like "is that hard?" and it says "no" and 20 minutes later I have a prototype browser extension.
So that plug-in you're talking about where an AI can see directly into your browser is another option, another is vibe-coding a custom browser extension. I think it was always pretty easy to write a browser extension but I had I done it myself my usual scholarly way I'd spend a few hours reading documentation before I started coding and never realized just how simple it is... Just the way people are discovering web crawlers and API integrations are easier than they thought.