Having dabbled in the space a bit: (on the less-malicious side, scraping for archiving, I imagine pro bot-writers are far beyond me.) There's an upper bound to

Having dabbled in the space a bit: (on the less-malicious side, scraping for archiving, I imagine pro bot-writers are far beyond me.) There's an upper bound to "bot complexity"; that being the complexity you want to impose on a normal user. For many sites (e.g. instagram) it's often easier to just "pretend to be a normal user" and hit it from a headless browser. You lose some functionality, but at least for my needs, that's always been a sufficient fallback. As such, I've always been of the opinion that the primary function of API limitations is to punish/limit/extract more money from the good participants.