There's nothing to hide behind, it's just a bit of automation. Who has the time to manually search this stuff out? The people who do that are stretched to breaking point. All associated names are known and the calculations are pretty simple.
I agree that ideally we'd have blockchain level changes and that these kinds of things are patches, along with cheetah, steemcleaners, etc. etc. but I'm sure you also appreciate the difficulty of that.
I think of it making one particular abuse vector less attractive. Others are working on other vectors, this is just one. I'd like to expand it but we go step by step.
We'll see how it pans out this time.