Also notable is that if you go to that section of their site (‘scraping API’), they don’t mention its deprecation and are still advising users upgrade to Pro to scrape.
I guess they can’t figure out how to charge enterprise clients more than the common folk or stand-alone security researchers not backed by a company. This also has the unintended consequence(or perhaps intended, since it is the source of the content people are paying for) of concealing the behavior of malicious actors. Either way, I can almost say with certainty, that I don’t think people were upgrading to Pro for any of their other features.