so why not just do that for these scrapers, rather than complicate it by encrypting and decrypting, which is just obfuscation as the private key is clearly available to the end-user?

tbh i did not encrypt decrypt for the ai scrapers at all, a lot of people were previously trying to download data directly from my API that my frontend uses and this kinda pissed me off a bit. So I added encryption/decryption to the mix and will release the newer version. As I mentioned earlier as well, can someone sit through and decrypt it? yes. Will 99% of them do it? no! Thats where I win