While everyone is chasing SOCKS5, plain HTTP proxies quietly do their job. And for half the tasks they are genuinely enough: open a site from another country, check availability, hit an API. It works simply: your request goes to the proxy, it visits the site and returns the answer. You hide your IP and use someone else's.
What HTTP proxies cannot do is torrents and raw TCP connections. For those you need SOCKS5. But HTTP proxies are easier to set up and usually cheaper. If you need a proxy for checking websites from different regions — this is plenty.
Beginners often ask what an HTTP proxy even is. Basically it is a middleman between you and the internet that works at the level of web requests. Setting up an HTTP proxy in your browser takes a minute: address, port, done.
My rule is simple: for one-off tasks I take HTTP proxies for work, for constant automation — SOCKS5. And in both cases the pool must be alive, otherwise it all loses meaning. An HTTP proxy for scraping is also a fine option if the site is simple and does not need heavy protocols.