That much is clear, yeah. The VPN they use may not be a service advertised to public and featured in lists, however.
Some of the new traffic did come directly from Tencent data center IP ranges and reportedly those bots signed themselves in UA. I can’t say whether they respect robots.txt because I am told their ranges were banned along with robots.txt tightening. However, US IP bots that remain unblocked and fake UA naturally ignore robot rules.
I'm seeing some address ranges in the US clearly serving what must be VPN traffic from Asia, and I'm also seeing an uptick in TOR traffic looking for feeds as well as WP infra.
