I really enjoyed the writing style in this article.

And the bot progression from "alter user agent" to "change IP addresses" to providers having to ban whole subnets, whole ASNs, and realizing "proxy SDK monetization" is a thing mirrors threat actor progression from the time before LLMs.

It feels like this progression of increasingly drastic measures to circumvent the protections of a computer system ought to be enough to establish criminal intent and get some of the people running those crawlers into prison.

It goes beyond mirrors, it's just something criminals have been doing since forever, to abuse all websites.