The problem is they played a little too nice, and now a literal massbot was able to scare them into self destruction.

Because there is zero chance all the big 3 companies behind this manually tagged a bunch of forgotten manga from 20 years ago that nobody had read in years. They absolutely just sent a bot to do it from their archives.

And as such, MD jumped the gun fast to protect themselves, and in doing so tanked their consumer reliability. Even a single day of "working on it" or just a fucking list would have blunted a lot of the damage towards themselves, while still being compliant. But they cowered and refused to even acknowledge it beyond "hey we got a DMCA, soz" while people panicked wondering individually why their stuff was gone.