Canonical urls help with noting your own purposeful duplicated content. But that meta tag goes on the duplicated content. So it doesn't help with scrapers, who strip that out.
But I thought that it was useful for google - who could find two caches with same content, one of which was 2018 one of which 2020 and both say "this is canonical". At that point the 2018 version is real and the other rejected.
Then again, you could just do it with publication dates ...
Then again, you could just do it with publication dates ...