> some dude with a decent gaming PC could decide to start scraping everything pertaining to their interests just for the hell of it.

Not from their single residential IP, they are not.

If they do succeed[1] - it is not going to be at hundreds or thousands of requests per second that the current AI scrapers bombard servers with. Some dude at home will, at best, be putting 4-6 orders of magnitude less strain on a limited set of servers.

1. Scraping is an arms race: if you're just "some dude" at the skill floor - you're going to have a bad time whether you're scraping, or defending against scrapers.