google sheets is awesome, they even let you reply to rudimentary get requests and define your own functions with google script. I think it is a hidden gem.
Watir lets you host your own headless firefox or google chrome on a cheap server thanks to the headless gem. All headless does is to start Xvfb and let you execute the browser in it.
What I really like in watir's interface is the wait_for functionality which you can sprinkle everywhere in order to wait until a button or a dropdown is actually rendered by javascript so you can click on it once it is queryable.
These days I use websockets and chrome puppeteer protocol to talk to the browser. It is somewhat faster and more robust than the chromiumdriver, but if I had to use watir again, I wouldn't mind it.
