The pickaxe guys coined it. People repeat it without thinking about it.

If matz were to say "jump from the bridge", people would do it, because matz is nice?

Just to point out: I do think matz is nice and a great language designer. That in itself doesn't mean anything. Why would I proxy my own decisions based on any mindless slogan? That makes no sense. Why do people in the ruby ecosystem keep on repeating those pointless slogans?

An easy win is to replace just the page main content and keep headers, menu and footers between navigations in the system.

That being said, one point is very correct here - by far the best effort to resist broad crawlers is a _custom_ anti-bot that could be as simple as "click your mouse 3 times" because handling something custom is very difficult in broad scale. It took the author just few minutes to solve this but for someone like Perplexity it would take hours of engineering and maintenance to implement a solution for each custom implementation which is likely just not worth it.

You can actually see this in real life if you google web scraping services and which targets they claim to bypass - all of them bypass generic anti-bots like Cloudflare, Akamai etc. but struggle with custom and rare stuff like Chinese websites or small forums because scraping market is a market like any other and high value problems are solved first. So becoming a low value problem is a very easy way to avoid confrontation.