The bots are literally the equiv of one user mass downloading/viewing stuff, shouldnt be that big a deal, scraping in general happens a lot with ppl using stuff like ytdlp through web frontends. In this case its mostly text too, its not like he had thousands of bots (feels like you're conflating a few bots scraping some text and audio to kids doing ddos attacks)

decided that scraping the internet for fanworks and hosting them on a new site without asking permission from any of the creators was a good idea

The thing is, in any fetish and fanfic community there will be a body of works accumulated over the years that contains many classics but the authors are only a nickname. Sometimes there's an email listed that stopped working decades ago.

The sites that host the works are usually run by enthusiasts. Over the years they lose the incentive to maintain them. Whenever a site goes down and others take its place there's always a dilemma about what to do with that body of work.

Technically speaking, yes, any site that's not the site where each author originally uploaded their work is in breach of copyright and/or licensing for those works. On the other hand, if you were to attempt to contact each author and only carry forward the works where you get an answer and permission... only a tiny fraction would qualify, and massive portions of the literature would be lost in each move.