Well, maybe they found themselves in the last hours of the deadline without the reviews done... in some cases due to procrastination, but in a few cases perhaps because life is hard and they just couldn't do it. So they used the LLM as a last resort to not go beyond deadline (which I assume maybe was penalized as well?)

To err is human, it makes sense that they are punished (and the harshest part of the punishment is not having a paper rejected, it's the loss of face with coauthors and others, BTW. Face is important in academia) but "for life" is way too much IMO.