I saw a good explanation as to why it can be considered theft. That got me thinking about a car I had that was stolen. I got it back and it was not damaged in any way, but it was still stolen.
So in light of that I changed my opinion.

My thinking at the time was that people will get it back. I have read stories about exchanges that have closed up shop and people lost everything they had in the exchange permanently !
Hopefully that will not be the case here.

At the time when i was making comments about not being stolen, I did not conciser the Steemit inc funds stolen ether. But in light of the above, maybe there is case to be made that it was stolen? I dont know