This whole debate over who is and who isn’t a moderator and how they function reminds me of a similar debate on a computer designer newsgroup some 30 years ago.
The debate back then was whether one of the more prolific participants was a real person or an experimental artificial intelligence engine (akin to the famous Turing test experiments.)
There was never any resolution to the debate, but it was fun to read the evidence proponents of each side offered to support their claim.