It is in Illinois. Their Computer Tampering law specifically makes violation of a web sites ToS punishable by up to 5 years in prison. Probably other states have similar.

https://njal.la/ looks interesting.

Typically for copyright infringement. They'll sue you for the maximum legal damages possible per copy, multiplied by the number of times your bot loaded a page, probably in the trillions of dollars.

So have the bot act on behalf of the user, using workers run on the user's machine. That's fair use.

Are you in the habit of releasing software that causes users to violate the ToS of services?

I'm happy to write code to let users circumvent the restrictions put in place by assholes, as long as it doesn't end up getting them in legal trouble I'm fine with it. If companies like google don't want people to try and screw them over, I suggest they offer an olive branch and stop being unethical jerks.

Yelp can afford lawyers who will try to convince a judge otherwise. Can you afford lawyers to argue your case?