alt Hacker NewsIt definitely lowers the barrier. But relying on messy HTML as a defense against competitors is 'security through obscurity'. It does not stop them; it just costs you server CPU. The data is public. If you put it on the screen, a scraper can read it. CommerceTXT just ensures that the good bots (AI Agents bringing customers) get it efficiently, while you can still block the bad ones via WAF.
If it delivers accurate data then I can hit that instead of scraping the full HTML. Everybody wins.
What I have found, however, with existing standardization of this kind of data (yours is not the first!), is that shopping sites (big ones) will lie, and you still need to read the HTML as ground truth.