While this is idiotic and counter productive long term, the thing to remember, it's not just one scraper, it's hundreds of them, simultaneously trying to outscrape the other, each trying to hoover up as much as possible as fast as possible.

If that's not enough, the Facebook scrapers hit the same URL over and over again, even when that URL returns an error. Their approach to web scraping is essentially: "Fuck you, deal with it", even if the website is run by a small business that cannot financially justify more bandwidth or server capacity.

I've seen this process bring sites down, to the point of actively having to block all non-human requests, just to be able to serve customers. This of course doesn't work long term because the bots continue to probe and morph.