It's not reasonable to infer that the site had been around for a long time but that archiving was just turned on the other day.
Occam's Razer would suggest that the site was created just the other day.
-PJ
I think some of these web archive orgs operate partly on a request basis. That is, if there’s a website that has content that you think is noteworthy and should be preserved, you can request that they archive it. In some cases it’s a paid service where you pay a fee.
It seems possible that when the Pelosi story broke, someone said, hey, we need to get this Depepe guy’s blog archived before it gets taken down, and they sent a request to Archive.org at which point they started taking snapshots. That might explain why it suddenly showed up at the time of the story.
The archives don’t have the resources to record the whole internet all the time. Instead they focus on “historically relevant” sites like news sites and say the top 1000 visited sites on the WWW. Maybe they have some kind of algorithm to determine which ones get prioritized. The rest get sampled less often, and not necessarily in a routine way, or they don’t get sampled at all, as I understand it.
The only reason I know a tiny bit about web archives is that I tried to look up something on wayback a few weeks ago and was surprised by how much stuff doesn’t get archived, including the thing I was hoping to dig up. Most of the archives have a page about their methodology and there are quite a few articles about them out there.
An interesting test might be to use the waybackmachine to look up some obscure Wordpress blogs that are known to have existed for many years to see how their archive history looks compared to Depepe’s.