I am seeing lots of entries that could be better (or at least partially) updated using data from company websites. For example, the local pharmacy chain or fast food restaurant's hours are on their site.
Does anyone more clued in to OSM know why/if these can't be updated via web site scraping?
They can! That's a different process called importing, and people do that a lot. For example, I've imported all of Walmarts in the US a few years ago by request. See OSM wiki on imports: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import
Does anyone more clued in to OSM know why/if these can't be updated via web site scraping?