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As I said, the "traditional" CDLs were also in a legal grey area. But once the publishers are suing IA for going full Library Genesis anyway, why not also include those?

I went back to one of the older articles I could find on this subject, from before the lawsuit was filed. Some particularly-relevant excerpts:

Until this week, the Open Library only allowed people to "check out" as many copies as the library owned. If you wanted to read a book but all copies were already checked out by other patrons, you had to join a waiting list for that book—just like you would at a physical library.

Of course, such restrictions are artificial when you're distributing digital files. Earlier this week, with libraries closing around the world, the Internet Archive announced a major change: it is temporarily getting rid of these waiting lists.

...

James Grimmelmann, a legal scholar at Cornell University, told Ars that the legal status of this kind of lending is far from clear—even if a library limits its lending to the number of books it has in stock. He wasn't able to name any legal cases involving people "lending" digital copies of books the way the Internet Archive was doing.

...

The legal basis for the Open Library's lending program may be even shakier now that the Internet Archive has removed limits on the number of books people can borrow. The benefits of this expanded lending during a pandemic are obvious. But it's not clear if that makes a difference under copyright law. "There is no specific pandemic exception" in copyright law, Grimmelmann told Ars.

Ironically the FAQ that Internet Archive put online has been taken down, but I found it in their Wayback Machine. It says:

The library will have suspended waitlists through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later. After that, waitlists will be dramatically reduced to their normal capacity, which is based on the number of physical copies in Open Libraries.

So it seems pretty clear to me that by "suspending waitlists" it means that they're going to "lend" more copies simultaneously than they actually have.

The Internet Archive had been poking a bear with a stick for years and the bear had been grumbling but not otherwise responding. So they decided to try giving it a whack across the nose with the stick instead. Normally I'd just sigh and shake my head at their stupidity, but they're carrying a precious cargo on their back while they're needlessly provoking that bear, and now they're screaming "oh no my precious cargo! Help me!" While the bear has a firm grip on their leg. That makes me extra frustrated and angry at them for doing this.

I'm not siding with the bear here, I should be very clear. The publishers are awful, the whole concept of copyright has become corrupt and broken, and so on and so forth. But the Internet Archive isn't supposed to be fighting this fight. They were supposed to be protecting that precious cargo, and provoking the bear is the opposite of doing that.

But I want to be outraged now!

The emergency library followed the same legal framework that ebook lending follows at local libraries.

No, it did not. From the Wikipedia article:

On March 24, 2020, as a result of shutdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Internet Archive opened the National Emergency Library, removing the waitlists used in Open Library and expanding access to these books for all readers.

Emphasis added. They took the limits off.

What the libraries do is already in a legal grey area, the publishers just don't go after it because it's more trouble than it's worth and would bring bad press. Like how most rightsholders ignore fanfiction. But the IA went way beyond that and smacked them in the face.

Don't blame IA for fulfilling their mission to make knowledge free.

Their mission is archiving the Internet. a mission that they are putting at risk with this stunt.

“Nurses are not against scientific or technological advancement, but we will not accept algorithms replacing the expertise, experience, holistic, and hands-on approach we bring to patient care,” they added.

You "won't accept" algorithms? What if those algorithms are demonstrably doing a better job than the nurses?

As a patient I want whatever works best for doing diagnoses and whatnot. If that's humans then let it be humans. If it's AI, then let it be AI.

Oh, for crying out loud, Internet Archive. This is not the fight you should be fighting.

The Internet Archive is the steward of an incredibly valuable repository of archived information. Much of what it's got squirrelled away is likely unique, irreplaceable historical records of things that have otherwise been lost. And they're risking all of that in this quixotic battle to share books that are widely available anyway and not at all at risk.

"Lending" out those books in the way that they did was blatant copyright violation spitting directly into the eye of publishers known to be litigious and vindictive. All to fight for a point that's not part of their mandate, archiving the Internet. They're going to lose and it's going to hurt them badly.

Each copy can only be loaned to one person at a time, to mimic the lending attributes of physical books.

Internet Archive believes that its approach falls under fair use but publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley, and Penguin Random House disagree. They filed a lawsuit in 2020 equating IA’s controlled digital lending operation to copyright infringement.

That is not what the lawsuit was about, Internet Archive. If you're going to fight this fight then be honest about what exactly you're fighting for. The lawsuit in 2020 was not about one-person-at-a-time lending, it was about your "COVID Emergency Library" where you removed all restrictions and let people download books freely.

I strongly believe that copyright has gone berserk of the decades and grown like an uncontrolled weed, harming the intellectual commons for the sake of megacorporations' profits. I'm a subscriber on this piracy community, after all. I believe in the position that Internet Archive is fighting for here, despite all the downvotes I'm surely about to be hammered with. But they shouldn't be the ones fighting it. Let someone else take this one on. Sci-Hub or Library Genesis, maybe.

no matter who wins we lose.

Not necessarily.

No, I'm genuinely disagreeing with you. Automation and robotics have dramatically reduced the amount of effort needed to achieve a given standard of living. If you feel like you're still putting a lot of effort in, you're likely getting a much higher quality of living than you would have for that amount of effort in the past.

The stuff I mentioned above is made in factories. It results in cheaper products. That means you don't have to save up as much money to get that stuff, which means you spend less time working for it.

How long would you have to work to earn enough to buy a computer if each computer was hand made?

I'm addressing part of your point. You said:

Just like pretty much all of the other industrialized machinery that was once touted to save us time and make working irrelevant.

With the clear implication that industrialized machinery hadn't saved us time. That's not the case.

I'm pointing out a very obvious way in which automation does indeed help benefit humans in general. We have access to sophisticated products at very low prices compared to what it would be like if all this stuff was made "by hand."

That's not going to help improve the electricity supply.