I suppose “evidence that the site’s leadership has permanently changed” would convince me. Whoever decided to put in the code that causes visitors to DDOS someone should never be running a web site again.

The person behind archive.today has churned through multiple aliases already, so any such claim would be highly dubious.

And since the site stores unauthorized copies of content, I don't expect any new leadership would be willing to announce much more than a pseudonym.

So, in your mind, there is no way for an individual owning archive.today to recover from this?

I mean, probably not. Maybe if they posted a public apology (an actual one, not a 'I'm sorry I was caught' one), listed the steps that they would take to ensure it doesn't happen again and how the fact that they weren't doing it could be publicly verified.

They've shown they're willing to deliberately weaponize their users to fight a personal dispute with someone, and didn't take corrective action when called out. Trustworthiness is something you lose and don't get back.

That is called Chutzpah.

HN and WP and the top communities (alongside with Reddit) using AT exclusively for piracy making all the legal troubles.

Now the pirates require "apology" from a free service they abuse, threatening that they will stop pirating otherwise.

If there was an apology it could be considered, depending on the apology (i.e. is it earnest?). But so far that does not seem to happen.