i think you're missing some key information. the warcs do not just contain the location header information. and their methods are fully public/open source so scenario 1 makes no sense.
sure maybe the warcs will be unlocked at some point in the future. this is a fairly small volunteer effort. i doubt there is some "unlock in 100 years" feature on IA.
i asked them why they did this. the answer surprisingly is because they fear if they release the full dumps they will get blocked because of the AI scraping wars.
people definitely should donate resources to archive team but as someone who has been participating in this project it's my understanding that all of the URLs at risk have already been backed up
I don't understand this cynicism. The people who could hypothetically push this forward don't have to be the same people selling prep or other anti-virals