I find the notion that you would use residential proxies to scrape LWN somewhat laughable, I'm reading this article using a VPN.
residential proxy bandwidth isn't that cheap, I could see it be used on a reddit (though i would probably just mass register accounts to bypass their block instead).
Right. This whole controversy makes no sense as a pure scraping thing. It seems more like someone is trying to take the web offline.
I ran a gitweb server which was battered by bots so I eventually had to take it down. Gitweb! You can just connect using the git protocol and download everything vastly more efficiently!
In other words, they don't care at all. For them, residential bandwidth is completely free.