Is 302 redirect hack still working?

Hi,

We are running a large well known news article website (lets call it www[.]oldplayer[.]com) in some niche.
1 year ago, a challenger (www[.]newcommer[.]com) has launched its own news website in the same niche and we noticed that their content was very well ranked, sometimes higher than ours for similar keywords and similar content, even if they have obviously much less users and visits than ours (we know for a fact that they have < 10% of our users).

Recently we noticed what looks like a 302 redirect attack, with small variations.

Basically, when we search our website domain names on Google filtering on their domain name with [site:newcommer[.]com SOME_DOMAIN_NAME] we see all our articles associated to their domain address.
For other query we found almost all website content in our niche associated with their domain address.

Following the links, it appears to be a chain of redirections finishing with our own website:


Both redirections are marked as follow links.
Plus these links are marked as not indexable (noindex), meaning they are excluded from Google SERP.
Because they were exluded from the SERP, we didn't knew about them until recently.

We noticed that they did that for > 100 domains in our niche (our website and almost every other websites we know).

Browsing on their website as a human user, we see direct links to our domain (like www[.]oldplayer/...) but not the redirection links (eg. : www[.]newcommer[.]com/abc/news1.html).
It seems only Google bot can see these addresses and they seem to have no purpose outside of Google bot.

It seems to us that this is related to their surprising good ranking on Google in a very short time (we are not sure).
It's probably not basic black hat trick which lasts 3 months because their ranking stays at the top of Google after 1 year.
Moreover, all the mechanic is very similar to the old 302 hijack attack but I thought it didn't work anymore.

From my understanding, 302 redirection can now pass the juice to the target domain since 1 year, but I read on this forum that it doesn't pass anything when the page is marked as noindex (www[.]blackhatworld[.]com/seo/does-link-juice-flow-from-noindex-pages.930459/)... which makes sense.