The article mentions using this as a means of detecting bots, not as a complaint that it's abusive.
EDIT: I was chastised, here's the original text of my comment: Did you read the article or just the title? They aren't claiming it's abusive. They're saying it's a viable signal to detect and ban bots.
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".[1]
Yeah but the abusive behavior is ignoring robots.txt and scraping to train AI. Following commented URLs was not the crime, just evidence inadvertently left behind.
> The robots.txt for the site in question forbids all crawlers, so they were either failing to check the policies expressed in that file, or ignoring them if they had.
EDIT: I was chastised, here's the original text of my comment: Did you read the article or just the title? They aren't claiming it's abusive. They're saying it's a viable signal to detect and ban bots.