someone is scraping my content, rewriting it with AI, backdating it, and then filing DMCA claims against ME as if i stole from THEM

i run a niche affiliate site in the home improvement space and been building it for 3 years. all original content cuz i write everything myself. it has about 200 articles, good rankings, decent traffic and so this site is literally my income.

about 2 months ago, i noticed my traffic dropping on some of my best performing pages. so i checked google and found near-identical versions of my articles on a site i've never seen before. it has the same structure, headings, examples, slightly reworded and it was clearly AI rewritten from my originals.

annoying but it happens right? but i figured google would sort it out since my content was published first except it wasn't. bc according to the timestamps on their site, their versions were published months before mine. some of them are dated before my site even existed and they backdated every single article to make it look like they were the original source.

then the DMCAs started coming...this person filed DMCA takedown requests against my content claiming i copied from them and google removed 6 of my pages from search results.

so i filed counter-notices and google's process takes weeks. meanwhile my rankings are tanking and this guy's site is climbing into my old positions using my own content wearing a fake mustache.

i've been trying to prove my content came first like i have wayback machine snapshots for some articles but not all of them. i have wordpress revision history but i don't know if google cares about that and original research photos with EXIF data from my phone but i don't know where to submit that.

the worst part is this person is doing it at scale bc i found 4 other sites in my niche that are getting the same treatment like legit same pattern. scrape, rewrite, backdate, DMCA. it's a whole operation.

has anyone dealt with this? is there a way to definitively prove publication dates to google? is there legal action i can take? i'm watching someone steal my entire site in slow motion and google is helping them do it :((