[zozbot234]

Author disambiguation can be a very hard problem in practice, especially with authors who share the same names (a relatively common occurrence in some non-Western countries) and work on similar things. It's even somewhat common to see the exact same ORCid (supposedly a unique identifier) attached to what's clearly papers published by distinct individuals. At some point, one pretty much has to guess.

[uptime]

Yes, I think some services attempt to retro-assign ORCIDs. I usually have to try to grab the affiliation and date to make sure I have the right person. Someday for the authors I follow I want to train a model to give me a match score with my Smiths and Lees etc.