I stopped using headless Chrome as the default scraper

Headless Chrome is useful. It is also overused. For years, the default answer to “this page is hard to scrape” has been some version of: Use Puppeteer. Use Playwright. Add stealth. Wait for the page. Extract the DOM. That works often enough that it became muscle memory. But using a browser as the first step for every page is expensive, slow, operationally annoying, and frequently unnecessary. I’m building webclaw , a web extraction API, CLI, and MCP server for AI agents. One of the biggest archi