The actual ruling says, literally, that "Adherence to the rules in a robots.txt file is voluntary."

It's not a settled area of law, but that seems to be the current position.

And the other rulings said the opposite.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yep, absolutely. I hear you. Like everything legal, it seems to be fuzzy and context-dependent.

And that is the point -- the HOPL asserts that you can just put a robots.txt on your website and say that it means bots accepted the terms in that file. In reality, that's a dubious claim.