This really seems like they did everything they could and still got abused by borderline criminal activity from scrapers. But i do really think it had an impac

This really seems like they did everything they could and still got abused by borderline criminal activity from scrapers. But i do really think it had an impact on scraping, it is just a matter of attrition and raising the cost so it should hurt more to scrape, the problem really never can go away, because at some point the scrapers can just start paying regular users to collect the data.