There are various aggregators who combine this list and a bunch of other sanctions/related lists like the BIS Entity List which is probably what he was referring to.

Have you ever witnessed this file being used by companies moving money stored in S3 as "shitlist2019.txt" for screening incoming transactions in production? Because that's what the article is alluding to.

No, but I have seen it being ingested and turned into some horrendous XML on a weekly basis.

I’ve seen it used with grep and awk.