The team of 404 had to hide their content so it isn’t easily used by content mills. The AI content mills are starting to become a very big thing. There is a podcast called Gadget Lab by WIRED, and last episode was about an interview made to a guy that owns several of these content mills. The guy claims he understands that what he is doing is bad, since he is churning out this kind of content that is likely to be full of mistakes and false information, and also claims that a team of people review the content before actually publishing it.
This is also being done via domain squatting, in which people buy old domains of blogs that were known, and start a new blog full of AI generated content in it.