My guess is, the forum lost so much traffic they can't afford to ban people anymore. When this forum was having its golden years, they would ban you for committing plagiarism forever. As always, once you bend a rule a little bit, soon that rule is gone completely. This is what we are experiencing here probably. It is becoming worse every day.
You may be right, but only admins can answer that question.
After all, permaban wasn't exactly ''perma'' as it was in the beginning.
As far as I remember, at first it was impossible to remove permaban and later exceptions from permaban were allowed, and later even removing permaban became almost common.
Perhaps we are now looking at a new phase of punishing members, where the first warning is given through a temporary ban, and no more through permaban.
This is a big change compared to the cases we had before on this forum, like the one from RegulusHr (
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5097792.0), who had to wait two years for his permaban to be forgiven, with the overwhelming support of the local community.