The success of the ongoing Anubis rollout proves the opposite. People are used to slowly-loading websites - the rise of garbage SPAs has seen to that. Staring at a spinner for a second every once in a while is not an issue for genuine users.
On the other hand, the additional CPU usage rises the compute cost of scraping by several orders of magnitude. If you don't have to scrape this specific website, you'd be stupid not to move on and hit someone else.
Ideally the general cost of scraping would be high enough that it isn't affordable any more - especially anonymized - but considering the amount of money brainlessly being pumped into AI I doubt that'll happen any time soon.
You could of course also make the argument that the user's time is worth something as well and should be included as part of the cost, but that ship sailed a loooong time ago. If you care about that, you should be calling for the death of client-side Javascript and any form of advertising.
Scrapers generally aren't looking for random websites to scrape. They have a specific URL in mind. Only if the goal was DDoS would they not care which URL was accessed.
On the other hand, the additional CPU usage rises the compute cost of scraping by several orders of magnitude. If you don't have to scrape this specific website, you'd be stupid not to move on and hit someone else.
Ideally the general cost of scraping would be high enough that it isn't affordable any more - especially anonymized - but considering the amount of money brainlessly being pumped into AI I doubt that'll happen any time soon.
You could of course also make the argument that the user's time is worth something as well and should be included as part of the cost, but that ship sailed a loooong time ago. If you care about that, you should be calling for the death of client-side Javascript and any form of advertising.