My theory is that Instagram is probably trying to prevent bots capable of rendering pages and making changes on the DOM (e.g. Selenium or chromedp) from harvest

My theory is that Instagram is probably trying to prevent bots capable of rendering pages and making changes on the DOM (e.g. Selenium or chromedp) from harvesting their unauthenticated access rights to Instagram's frontend to crawl/collect images. Hence, as the author tried to circumvent it, they probably got IPbanned.