it has been a thing for a lot longer than anyone really knew about it, before it became common knowledge. Can’t blame the artists for not knowing of an undocumented feature that people only learned through word of mouth, an antisocial artist likely wouldn’t be aware of it, they’d be too busy drawing.
The responsibility still lies on the shoulders of the user. Anti social or not.
Do. Your. Research. Be smarter than what you’re working with. Doesn’t matter who you are or what you do.
The actual “real” problem with what was going on is the files were as uploaded (”raw”, after all), meaning they could also contain a bunch of metadata.
You could go to any blog where someone was posting selfies or pictures of their dog or of their plushie collection, check the “raw” file, and get the metadata their camera or phone adds; in many cases, that’s real name and GPS coordinates.
And this is Tumblr, where people regularly threaten to murder others over ships or skin tones in fanart…
Of course, rather than stripping out the metadata, Tumblr just blocks access to the file outright and forces on everyone their shitty resized and compressed garbage.