Earlier, scrapers were not harming a website much. maybe 1 or search engine hits a day, and just a handful of search engines meant that they would not consume much resources. they would scrape your data, but just so search would work (otherwise all search would just work on your website's title). this did not harm the websites' business model (if they had any).
it went downhill when google started giving dires "answers" to search queries. mostly based on wiki, but occasionaly other stuff like reddit. this was often just relevant bit from "high match" website and while it reduced some traffic to those webistes, it was not as bad as it is today - where all most all traffic is from scraping bots, and many just have stopped visiting sites directly.