And the pedantry matters only because the entities criming are too big and rich and financed by the right people.

It is basically a display of the societal threshold beyond which laws are not enforced.

But as I think you are suggesting, it may be an example of regulatory entrepreneurship, where (AI) companies try to move forward quickly before laws and regulations catch up with them, while simultaneously trying to influence new laws and regulations in their favor.

[Copyright law itself also has many peculiarities, for example not applying to recipes, game rules, or fashion designs (hence fast fashion, knockoffs, etc.) Does it, or should it, apply to AI training and GenAI services? Time will tell.]

My suspicion is also that what many artists are objecting to is less the training itself (though AI web crawlers are aggressive and annoying) and more the use of the trained model for large-scale generation of similar (and possibly competing) works ("derivative" in an artistic if not legal sense), in the artist's style, especially by large companies for commercial gain.