I am pretty sure that there are scripted bots that could scrape the source code,
First off we did not define what we mean "source code". On the web the code falls into to two categories, server side code (typically JS) and client side code (PHP, Node.js, Python, Perl...).
Client side:
No bot is needed to access the client side code, because for it to be able to run, it must be downloaded to the client's device and thus the client already has all the code.
Server side:
A typical web "crawler" bot sends requests to the server and the returns an http response with the data. What ever work was done on the server will have been completed before the response is returned to the bot. The bot has no access to server itself and thus cannot access the server side code. Now, there are plenty of bots that attempt to gain access to the server, but this is somewhat different, and I would be tempted to say it has more to do with server security than a choice of particular code stack, as weak security can impact any server running any code. But WP, due to it's prevalence and "black box" nature makes it particularly susceptible to this type attack. Many people running WP have little to no experience as webmasters and have little interest in learning, they just want to publish their blog, that is fine. But ignorance is not bliss, just because you are unaware of the existence of a particular risk, does not mean that you will not be impacted by it.
The thing about WP is that it is easier to copy using a browser than a bot because the "pages" don't physically exist except as unformatted table entries in a .sql file.
This is true basically true of any website not just WP. This of course assumes that the nature of the data is relatively linear and easily consumed on per page basis. There may times where getting "unformatted" data is preferable. But that is a whole separate discussion.
The other point raised in the thread is that "code bloat" somehow leads to obfuscation of the true content. And that simply is the case, To be clear, I'm referring here to "code bloat" in terms of HTML/CSS on a page. As server side code is completely irrelevant to the stealing of content. It is incredibly simple to parse content from HTML, bloating code doesn't change that. You can test this yourself, open "dev -tools" in your browser, select the "body" tag, then in the console type:
$0.innerText
All and only the text that appears on the page will be printed to the console. Regardless of the depth of the DOM tree or the number of useless css classes and id appear in the code.
Code bloat should be avoided because it can slow the page speed down, which in turn can have many negative effects on SEO, but code bloat will not prevent Googlebot or any other bot from capturing the content of the page.
