The way I get a fast web product is to pay a premium for data. So, no, it's not "lost time" by banning these entities, it's actual saved costs on my bandwidth and compute bills.
The bonus is my actual customers get the same benefits and don't notice any material loss from my content _not_ being scraped. How you see this as me being secretly taken advantage of is completely beyond me.
You are paying premium for data? Do you mean for traffic? Sounds like a bad deal to me. The tiniest Hetzner servers give you 20TB included per month. Either you really have lots of traffic, or you are paying for bad hosting deals.
When you're a business that serves specific customers, it's justifiable to block everyone who isn't your customer. Complaints about overblocking are relevant to public sites, not yours.
The bonus is my actual customers get the same benefits and don't notice any material loss from my content _not_ being scraped. How you see this as me being secretly taken advantage of is completely beyond me.