Yes I agree it's more likely incompetence than malice. That's another reason I don't think it's a lab. Even if you don't like the big labs you can probably admit they are reasonably smart/competent.

Residential IP providers definitely don't remove reputational risk. There are many ways people can find out what you are doing. The main one being that your employees might decide to tell on you.

The IP providers are a great way of getting around cloud flare etc. They are also reasonably expensive! I find it very plausible that these IP providers are involved but I still don't understand who is paying them.

This is just an anecdote, but having been dealing with similar problems on one of my websites for the past year or so, I was experiencing a huge number of hits from different residential IP addresses (mostly Latin American) at the same time once every 5-10 minutes (which started crashing my site regularly). Digging through my server's logs and watching them in real-time, I noticed one or two Huawei IP's making requests at the same time as the dozens or hundreds of residential IP's. Blocking the Huawei IP's seemed to mysteriously cut back the residential IP requests, at least for a short amount of time (i.e. a couple of hours).

This isn't to say every attack that looks similar is being done by Huawei (which I can't say for certain, anyway). But to me, it does look an awful lot like even large organizations you'd think would be competent can stoop to these levels. I don't have an answer for you as to why.

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Whether or not they had malice in their hearts when they implemented the scraper bots, their impact is still very much malicious.

“Residential IP” sounds expensive though…

Scraper proxying is another way to monetize botnets, and I suspect those "providers" are not expensive.