> Doesn't most/all react data come from xhr? Can't you just figure out how the xhr works, and simply parse that?

Content-heavy websites using React often generate static versions of pages at build time (using e.g. https://nextjs.org/docs/advanced-features/automatic-static-o...). In those cases, there might not be a public API endpoint to fetch the data you want

For applications though, it's definitely easier to just make an HTTP request if you can. However, you're more likely to run into issues like APIs blocking datacenter IPs, rate limiting etc than when it appears you're just loading the website like a human