I feel like every day I come across 15-20 "AI-powered tool"s that "analyze" something, and none of them clearly state how they use data. This one seems harmless enough, put a profile in, it will scrape everything about them, all their personal information, their location, every post they ever made... Nothing can possibly go wrong aggregating all that personal info, right? No idea where this data is sent, where it's stored, who it's sold to. Kinda alarming
That would always by definition block all third parties.
Think of the reddit example from the person you replied to: there was a huge outcry when reddit announced shutting down their lower API tiers.
Either information is free to flow or not at all, there is no middle ground.
With that in mind: I'm sure they thought about it and decided to prioritize transparency she flexibility over security. Personally I support that decision.
I know how APIs on reddit work, but you can block people who misuse the API if they're doing something nefarious. Some of these AI are in my honest opinion very taxing on hardware. Having to retrieve millions of posts, comments, pictures, text, on demand... and send that to who knows where for AI scraping.... Sounds very costly.