To a point; as the post mentions, they added instructions for LLMs to their website and increased their licensing inquiries tenfold (the article didn't state anything about actual licensing payments being made though).
I don't think there would be any issues per se if the scrapers just paid licensing fees to get the good / complete data. But the issue was that they started to try and find exploits to get to data earlier.
Instead of "lite" versions of the software, what they should do is upgrade all cars to the latest hardware for free. Currently that's AI4.5, which soon will be made obsolete by AI5:
To quote Agent Smith, "Have you ever stood and stared at it, marveled at it’s beauty, it’s genius? Billions of people just living out their lives, oblivious. Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world. Where none suffered. Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization which is of course what this is all about. Evolution, Morpheus, evolution. Like the dinosaur. Look out that window. You had your time. The future is our world, Morpheus. The future is our time."
Sites like The Numbers have to take on the cost of surviving the AI onslaught and the AI companies return nothing back to them.