It's pretty easy to see why this would cause problems, but the consulting companies have been pushing hard on RPA because when it blows up in 5 years, who are you going to call? I say this as a consultant who has to sell this awful crap because "partnerships".
Copy&paste is the enterprise API/data integrator of last resort. Image/video is another integration point. iOS can screen capture full-page images of web pages, with tools for human annotation. Soon the local ML/bionic processor and AR toolkit can perform text recognition on those images, which means they can be live edited, re-composed and fed into another system.
> fancy service desk platform the suits want may not have a connector to your 15 year old heavily-customized SAP instance (which is run by another team you have no influence with)
This intersects with DRM and the title of the OP story. When OrgA and OrgB fail to partner/cooperate (e.g. no formal integration) or are actively hostile (implement DRM to prevent data movement between OrgA and OrgB products), it creates pain for customers and new business opportunity for OrgC and OrgD.
Which is why scraping and reverse engineering are never going away, they are society's last line of defense against vendor org dysfunction.
One, and more often than not, applications embed a ton of business logic in the client which is not easily available in the API.
Two, and honestly I feel dirty writing this, the UI is usually a lot better tested. Or tested at all.
I'm just the messenger, here. We were very adamant about NOT doing this in my previous company or our current projects, but I can totally understand the "it's good enough for humans, it's good enough for machines" attitude. It makes me sad though.
