Not really. We have scraped many sites successfully that try this randomisation logic. There is always a pattern, which often can be determined via heuristics. It does make things trickier, but not impossible or especially difficult.

It feels like the point is just to raise the difficulty for script kiddies.

After all, there’s always headless browsers and OCR

Yeah, it's a bit pointless really. If you're going to put data on the open web, you should be prepared for it to be copied.

I think you can just iterate over the text nodes and see if you stumble upon every letter you're looking for in the right order, it would work for any kind of randomly added text.