I would like to believe this, but given the amount of spam that gets posted to CL—and given how well a sophisticated, heuristic anti-indexing WAF would block spambot request traffic as a simple side-effect—I find the idea a bit dubious.

A lot of spam on CL isn't created by bots, but by human beings.

As little as 3 years ago, I knew people who'd make job ads on elance asking someone to 'automate' their craigslist renewals and postings.

Dubious indeed.

that cant be right given how you can find cl pages on google

or they just decided to allow Google?