> I've seen people claiming that they have a bunch of paid accounts that they use to fetch the pages, which is, of course, ridiculous.

The curious part is that they allow web scraping arbitrary pages on demand. So if a publisher could put in a lot of arbitrary requests to archive their own pages and see them all coming from a single account or small subset of accounts.

I hope they haven't been stealing cookies from actual users through a botnet or something.

Exactly. If I was an admin of a popular news website I would try to archive some articles and look at the access logs in the backend. This cannot be too hard to figure out.