Working notes on web data collection. Why scrapers get blocked, what anti-bot defences measure, and how to decide between maintaining a stack and buying one.
It is the most-installed anti-detection package for Node and it solves a narrower problem than most people assume. Here is what it patches, what it never touched, and how to tell whether it is your bottleneck.
playwright-extra and the stealth plugin fix the JavaScript-visible layer. That layer stopped being the hard one. Here is what they still cover, what they cannot, and how to tell which problem you have.
Crawl4AI turns pages into clean Markdown for LLM pipelines, but it drives a stock Playwright browser from a datacenter IP. Here is what gets it blocked and the four options for fixing it.