Could be interesting to see how scammers are doing that, and lead to some potentially interesting insights about black hat SEO, social media marketing, targeted ads, etc.

Because yeah, as you said, getting approved by an ad network is only part of the story, and not very much of it at that.

If you're lucky, you trigger something in Google's black box and they rank your site better than others at the same level, but you'll still only do long tail, and even on long tail, you'll compete with the original source of the article, which has a billion links pointing to its domain. Since you'll also need to go for quantity, you'll have a giant amount of pages as well, which will not help you even with niche rankings.

I doubt that the site would pull in 10 actual, human visitors per day on average with just scraped content.

its really not easy to get the ad revenue, scraped websites can't rank good and get enough visitors, of course one can make fraud clicks system, but if one can do this level, he may easily find more interesting things, but not peanut $$