Your assumption that blocking is somehow ethical by default is not unproblematic.

There's a world wide web built by academics for free exchange of information and there's a closed garden web built by major capitalists.

Just how free that exchange of information should be is not a settled problem. Some very libertarians argue along the lines of information "wanting to be free". Some commercial entities seem to identify copyright and trademark law with moral doctrines. There are plenty of arguments for in-between positions as well.

If we look at less democratic societies, the efforts made to circumnavigate state censorship are publicly lauded as morally good actions by the international community. Could an analogy be drawn to large corporations censoring the less fortunate in a economically uneven societies too, for instance?

Your assumption that blocking is somehow ethical by default is not unproblematic.

is itself an assumption.

The problem I'm concerned with is aggressive (either deliberately or ignorantly) crawling/scraping of non-commercial sites which often lack the financial resources to defend against activities enabled without apparent concern by tools like the site here.

If a site allows reasonable access in good faith, then subverting those limits and constraints for self-serving reasons is ethically dubious at best, and any service not addressing that while promising to enable that subversion should be questioned.