Their point was that the RSS reader does the scraping on its own in the background, without user input. If it can't read the page, it can't; it's not initiated

Their point was that the RSS reader does the scraping on its own in the background, without user input. If it can't read the page, it can't; it's not initiated by the user where the user can click on a "I'm not a bot, I promise" button.