News agencies like AP have already come up with technical standards and guidelines to technically define 'acceptable' types and degrees of image processing applied to professional photo-journalism.

You can look it up because it's published on the web but IIRC it's generally what you'd expect. It's okay to do whole-image processing where all pixels have the same algorithm applied like the basic brightness, contrast, color, tint, gamma, levels, cropping, scaling, etc filters that have been standard for decades. The usual debayering and color space conversions are also fine. Selectively removing, adding or changing only some pixels or objects is generally not okay for journalistic purposes. Obviously, per-object AI enhancement of the type many mobile phones and social media apps apply by default don't meet such standards.

I think Samsung was doing what was alleged, but as somebody who was working on state of the art algorithms for camera processing at a competitor while this was happening, this experiment does not prove what is alleged. Gaussian blurring does not remove the information, you can deconvolve and it's possible that Samsung's pre-ML super resolution was essentially the same as inverting a gaussian convolution