Yes, but those automated browsers are much more expensive to operate than simple HTTP clients pretending to be browsers.

It's an arms race/defense-in-depth situation. If someone truly wants to automate your site in a targeted fashion, and it's profitable for them to do so, you'll have to invest a lot more in stopping it (and decide how much of it is worth stopping).

Even youtube fails with yt-dlp going as far as a internal python file that parses javascript and execute them.

There is nothing they can do, anything they can imagine to use as a signal for a bot user can be made to look legitimate. There is no way to win.

My college English professor was so obsessed with beating cliff notes that all of tests were hyper focused on the most obscure details he could dream up. It was just impossible to maintain a full course load and memorize what was the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th , last, etc word on every page and which character spoke it. Did the sentence contain any commas? How many times was the nurse mentioned in chapter X, etc.

Google can always follow his lead and make their data impossible to access, but impossible doesn’t increase ad views, so they will never do it. People using ytdlp is just the cost of doing business.