I may be mistaken, but I believe an administrator needs to unban someone if they will be unbanned. If this was not the case, I would think an admin would be aware of anyone unbanned.
Global mods can unban and they can issue signature bans now too. Hacker1010010101010101010101010101 was one of the first users to get this leniency after globals got the tools to do signature bans. It's very likely that admins were not involved nor aware.
Discussing some other cases here and whether they're better or worse is quite pointless. I don't think admins or globals will read this dumpster fire of a thread. We don't know how many instances of plagiarism and/or post reports and/or prior offenses or any other circumstances are involved in each case. I really doubt that ALL admins and globals (6-7 people?) are involved in some conspiracy to support one ICO spammer and/or to attack some other user. Keep reporting posts that break the rules and if the user keeps breaking the rules they will get banned. Even game-protect eventually got banned.