These are all the whales. They are self-appointed hall monitors who have finally successfully killed off Steemit for the average person. They create bot upon bot for themselves, but prohibit others from doing it.
Sadly, this platform has become a blockchain joke. I really had such high hopes for this place.
This has nothing to do with whales, these are likely regular people with technical skills or manpower exploiting a flawed system.
Then who is to blame since you have immediately ruled out the whales?
Steemit Inc makes the accounts, this is all about bad actors abusing the Steem Faucet, some of them can be whales but I highly doubt it, there are much more efficient ways to abuse the system if you already have Steem Power (and thus a whale).
That's the thing with power, isn't it? It's never enough until it destroys everything.