Headless Chrome is useful. It is also where a lot of scraping systems go to become slow, expensive, and impossible to reason about. I am building webclaw , a web extraction API, CLI, and MCP server for agents and LLM apps. One architecture decision keeps paying for itself: The browser is a fallback. Not the default. Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode That sounds obvious until a target page gets annoying. Then the reflex kicks in: Use Playwright. Launch Chrome. Wait for network idle. Extract the DOM. Ship it. Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode It works often enough that people confuse it with a strategy. It is not a strategy. It is an expensive hammer. Browser-first scraping demos well The browser-first pipeline is simple: URL -> browser -> rendered DOM -> extraction Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode For demos, this is great. You point Puppeteer or Playwright at a page. JavaScript runs. The DOM appears. You grab text. Everyone claps.…