> I have no idea why there's loads of residential trawlers/botnets with 10k+ IPs trying to get that data

Probably as simple as the fact that there are unmetered residential proxy plans, which means once you're already paying for one, there's no reason not to use it for everything.

If you block it, it comes back with a residential proxy network and headless Chrome. Better not to block based on the obvious signs.

Blocking is too obvious. I would prefer to feed back false information but only to LLM crawlers.