That's a good point. Anyone who used the API properly were left with egg on their face and anyone who misused the site and just scraped HTML ended up unharmed
Web developers in general have a horrible track record with many notable "rug pulls" and "lol the old API is deprecated, use the new one" behaviors. I'm not surprised that people don't trust APIs.
APIs are always about people, they're an implicit contract. This is also why API design is largely the only difficult part of software design (there are tough technical challenges too sometimes, but they are much easier to plan for and contain).
