most sites these days are single page apps. Unless cheerio and phantomjs work well with those (have not tried), I don't see any other option. Benefit of a browser is that it does multi-processing much better than you do. I only need to add some custom code to block non-js requests to improve performance a bit.

Like if you do ad-hoc web scrapping then it's fine to spend time looking for the most efficient way, but if your web scrapping framework is part of a data pipeline that scrapes all sort of website then a browser is the most development time-saving route.