A lot of crawlers, if not all, have a policy like "if you disallow our robot, it might take a day or two before it notices". They surely follow the path "check if we have robots.txt that allows us to scan this site, if we don't get and store robots.txt, scan at least the root of the site and its links". There won't be a second scan, and they consider that they are respecting robots.txt. Kind of "better ask for forgiveness than for permission".
That is indistinguishable from not respecting robots.txt. There is a robots.txt on the root the first time they ask for it, and they read the page and follow its links regardless.
I agree with you. I only stated how the crawlers seem to work, if you read their pages or try to block/slow down them it seems clear that they scan-first-respect-after. But somehow people understood that I approve that behaviour.
For those bad crawlers, which I very much disapprove, "not respecting robots.txt" equals "don't even read robots.txt, or if I read it ignore it completely". For them, "respecting robots.txt" means "scan the page for potential links, and after that parse and respect robots.txt". Which I disapprove and don't condone.
