It makes sense and it is how the internet works. Servers cherry pick who sees their content all the time. Scrapers are often blocked, as are entire IP address ranges. Things like Selenium server scrapers can be (approximately) detected and often are denied access.

I’m not sure about being anti-competitive. Serving a website is an action in which you open up your resources for others to access. My friend runs an open source stock market tracking website for free. He started getting hit with scrapers from big hedge funds and fintech companies a couple of months back. This costs him around $50-100 a month to serve all of these scrapers.