It's not about what the law allows, it's about the cost to defend yourself. And yes, there are cases such as in web scraping where that has been ruled against the law (running whatever code you want on your machine...not about DOSing or distributing, just running). There have been other cases where simply accessing ToS-disallowed parts of a site has been ruled illegal too, whether we like it or not. That the OP is being asked to risk his livelihood and money defending himself for others ideals in light of these past rulings is armchair idealism. I made it clear in my original statement that it's not exactly about who's right, it's about the cost of being right, especially in non-obvious situations.
In the 90s the music industry tried to claim that the buffering data while playing music was making a copy of their data for which they should be paid or which they did not authorize. A few technically ignorant judges initially sided with this argument but it was eventually laughed away.
Your calling this "armchair idealism" makes me think you might be suffering from a legal system Stockholm syndrome.