People usually point at the scale when this discussion comes up, in my experience. These companies are doing something at a huge scale spending tons of money to do it so the potential harm is greater.

People can easily justify their own piracy because it’s small scale. Even when they organize, create a whole software and tooling ecosystem around pirating media to stick into jellyfin or plex. AI still did it bigger and worse and is bad, what I’m doing is not so bad because I wasn’t going to buy the movie anyway, etc.

On the whole, about 35% of internet users are ad-blocking. In the tech space it's upwards of 70%.

It's in no way, shape, or form "small scale", and has fundamentally changed the the very nature of the internet for the worse (opinions/views of ad blocking people don't matter).

Don't forget that the money being spent to do said scraping has, in great sums, come from subsidies paid by taxes from public coffers.