Sure, I do as well, I have my own VPN into my home office that lets me run traffic outbound through its default gateway while I'm somewhere else. But letting random third parties I don't know run traffic through my house is another thing entirely.

If it meant you got to run your traffic through other people's houses, would that be a good trade?

Do you really need residential ip for this? for my news scraping i have choose static datacenter proxy first, rotating only as fallback, direct as last. flaresolverr covered cloudflare js challenge, but it wedge on memory time to time, so i add healthcheck for it. on my own site aws waf meet datacenter ua with captcha, so i understand other side too. residential never was necessary for me, but maybe my targets are just easier, what do you scrape?

To be clear, bot spam and social media manipulation are legitimate business needs for the business selling said services.

You can't have legitimate business needs if you're not a legitimate business in the first place. Ban them all.

Who decides which businesses are legitimate?