Maybe they have just too much money at hand, would not surprise me, people are still investing into gen AI like there is no tomorrow. Also, for the completely criminal operations, you only have to find a way to infect and distribute your bot to, e.g. some common internet of shit device. Scaling is basically free afterwards as you don't need to ask anyone. The article also hints that those are actually the biggest problem.

Then there is probably also a lot of time pressure on the people implementing and operating those scrapers so they have even less incentive to optimize their code.