Why tough? To me, it seems more prone to issues (hallucinations, prompt injections etc). It is also slower and more expensive at the same time. I also think it is harder to implement properly, and you need to add way more tests in order to be confident it works.
Generally I agree with your point, but there is some value in a parser that doesn’t have to be updated when the underlying HTML changes.
Whether or not this benefit outweighs the significant problems (cost, speed, accuracy and determinism) is up to the use case. For most use cases I can think of, the speed and accuracy of an actual parser would be preferable.
However, in situations where one is parsing highly dynamic HTML (eg if each business type had slightly different output, or you are scraping a site which updates the structure frequently and breaks your hand written parser) then this could be worth the accuracy loss.
You could employ an LLM to give you updated queries when the format changes. This is something where they should shine. And you get something that you can audit and exhaustively test.
