Comment by TZubiri

Politics aside, this is a sensible position, there was a major client revision, they can put security measures in the new version that are not present in the older one, this happens in many many industries.

To be specific, the defensive measures probably rely on javascript, captchas and captchaless bot detection measures (probably javascript), like measuring mouse movement and stuff like that. So sending a client with javascript that loads content if some security checks pass, is harder to abuse than a plain html site that sends all content in the first request.