I can't speak to LWN, but from what I've seen this is a bot that crawls the site, generates search terms and "deeper" crawling techniques using AI, and then makes another set of requests.
This would be generating topical queries to add search for, e.g.,
This would be generating topical queries to add search for, e.g.,
Again -- they don't say specifically what the traffic is doing, and this is just an example, but in this scenario DDOS is probably closer to accurate.