I used to predate my blog posts in Wordpress by years. Why would you use todays date? No one reads blogs in order, how pedestrian to follow the old rules.
You can also fool some of Googles date metadata, it's not just the day it's first indexed. Reddit by incompetence screws with it.
AI will go back and change the past. Not even Google/Web Archive can record it all. Is it AI pre-dating or was it missed on Web Archive here? (A: The Facebook comments seem real, so missed by Web Archive, but if Facebook deletes/makes private the data then we are back to not knowing)
Either way, the article seems mostly fine to me.