Comment by Izkata

This is the big question everyone here seems to be skipping over. It seems like they're using "database" in the colloquial sense and actually mean some sort of already public data that's just rate limited (for example https://www.nlrb.gov/advanced-search).

Then depending on the order of events, either scraping didn't work well enough and were given "unlimited" (not rate limited) access, or the accounts were actually denied so they fell back to scraping. Or perhaps these two things are just unrelated despite what the story is claiming.