I'm the author of the article, Thanks for posting this article and I appreciate all the feedback received.

Indeed, it seems the cost of using the OpenAI API for scrapers at scale is high. However, in my opinion, optimization is key. As some comments suggested, scrapers could employ finely-tuned, smaller models—perhaps distilled from ChatGPT—to achieve similar tasks at a lower cost.

One takeaway from this article might be that obscuring text might be ineffective (and potentially always has been) if all the data is centralized in one place. In such instances, a Language Model is just as powerful as a human.