The 65K IP addresses cost 1.638M dollars, thats alot more than they would spend doing the exact same thing today.

The idea is to accept bad actors but make it more expensive and also you can directly identify cliques by IP ect.

Yeah, but he's got a botnet of residential ips that he didn't pay for.

You don't need to own them. You just need to rent the rights to send a spam message on a particular service using a proxy.