that’s because websites have evolved into web apps.

Most websites haven’t done that

Sadly, the fact a given site works for you or me is no guarantee it works for someone else.

These bot detection systems tend to use all manner of imprecise statistical heuristics and weird fingerprinting.

Perhaps AegirLeet has a graphics card that a popular web scraper pretends to have. Maybe they're in a suspicious timezone. Maybe they've installed a font usually only found on a different operating system. Maybe I'm never blocked because I have an excellent IP reputation, due to regular visits to approved websites.

Fingerprinting is scarily accurate now, strangely. https://fingerprint.com/

Somehow, it doesn't matter. Like the fact that the author shared non-repudiable identification information with the site also didn't matter and he was classified as a robot anyway.

yeah, starting that that invisible pixels and cookie tracking are way in the past and unless you're using something like tor (and not changing the resolution) then they know who you are. I mean you can still block ads and cookies, but I figure they really do know who you are.

As a data point, enabling privacy.resistFingerprinting on Firefox defeats this website.