I suppose points 2) and 3) can (but unlikely to -- see below) be unintentional, but point 1) is clearly intentional and sufficient to consider this chart manipulative.

As for the color scheme choice -- almost any other option would have been better. If the colors were random, it would have removed the ability to recover the trend in any way except of tedious manual comparison, but at least it would be certainly bias-free. If mapped to some color gradient -- well, fitting 28 points is hard, but at least close colors would have matched close years. But this scheme is different. It _looks_ like the gradient map, and invites the reader to mentally build the year-to-year trend, but some colors are nearly repeated in distant areas! This is a cardinal sin of using color mapping for dimensional representation, and it's hard for me to imagine this could be done unintentionally.

Not to mention that this is not a good choice for representing YTY trend; 2D color map, like in https://xkcd.com/1410/, would be so much better.