There is a grain of truth in what you say, but your conclusions are off.

Tether started as a way to pump the Bitcoin price, under the guise of better facilitating payments on crypto exchanges. They’d issue Tethers out of nowhere and use it to buy BTC and wash trade.

It was so successful it got to the level many people thought of it as “as good as dollars”.

This led to massive demand for it outside of Bitcoin pumpers - with criminals, sanctions evaders, money launderers of all kinds. Your granny needs to buy tethers to send money to the scammer she’s on the phone to.

So yes I do think they’ve probably moved away from issuing unbacked tethers. But only because they’ve found another niche which is also extremely suspect.

There is nothing to commend these guys. It’s a massive scam.