Their explanation for ignoring robots makes sense - they say they ignore it because their crawler only runs when a human enters a URL and archives it, they also link to Google as this is what they do.

How do you figure?

What do you mean? There’s a line of companies waiting to sue anyone involved with that site. That’s been the case for many years.

A site devoted to duplicating content from elsewhere online, and with a significant use-case of defeating paywalls, would be a very likely candidate for lawsuits.

Concealing ownership would tend to help avoid this / minimise consequences.

That might still be a brittle defence.