Its not a issue when somebody does "ethical" scraping, with for instance, a 250ms delay between requests, and a active cache that checks specific pages (like news article links) to rescrape at 12 or 24h intervals. This type of scraping results in almost no pressure on the websites.
The issue that i have seen, is that the more unscrupulous parties, just let their scrapers go wild, constantly rescraping again and again because the cost of scraping is extreme low. A small VM can easily push 1000's of scraps per second, let alone somebody with more dedicated resources.
Actually building a "ethical" scraper involves more time, as you need to fine tune it per website. Unfortunately, this behavior is going to cost the more ethical scraper a ton, as anti-scraping efforts will increase the cost on our side.