Is it just me or did scraping get 10x harder in the last 6 months?

Hi everyone. Since this is the first post here I figured I’d kick things off with a sanity check.

Is anyone else feeling like the major retailers (Home Depot, Amazon, even Walmart) completely changed their bot detection around the holidays? I used to get away with standard datacenter IPs and some basic header rotation in 2025, but now Im getting hit with "access Denied" or those infinite cloudflare loops almost instantly.

I’m rebuilding my production scrapers for 2026 and trying to figure out where to spend budget. What are u guys running this month?

Here is what I’m seeing:

• Playwright with stealth plugins seems hit or miss now. Are we moving back to raw TLS requests or is browser automation still viable for u?

• The cost of residential IPs is getting crazy. I tried a few 'cheap' providers but the quality was trash

• AI solvers are getting faster but half the time the site blocks me before the captcha even loads

Would love to know what your current "unblockable" stack looks like right now.

Btw sorry if this is a dumb question, just feeling burned out trying to bypass these new fingerprints.

Let me know what tools are saving your life rn.