Some of these used the site using legitimate URLs, others were looking for back doors, most likely so they could get to the data before it appeared on the site, or to manipulate the data presented to users.
I'm sure they know what they're doing, making me very wrong, but bots probing for back doors is very common, and not at all anything to be concerned about. The attackers most likely don't even care about the data, all they want is another site to spread malware or to join their botnet.
AI scrapers can be brutal though, and is very relevant.
My understanding is that those settings just disable priority alerts, only some custom roms will let you disable critical alerts.