What’s the best way to handle web scraping with PHP these days? or How can I improve my web scraping

If you're still using Simple HTML DOM for web scraping php, you should definitely check out Symfony's Panther. It's like Goutte but with a headless browser, so it handles JS-heavy sites way better.

For proxies, I rotate between Luminati and Smartproxy. They’re not free, but way more reliable than free ones. Also, set random delays between 2-10 secs—annoying but necessary.

CAPTCHAs? Ugh. I just use 2Captcha’s API. Costs a bit, but saves sanity.